I don’t easily gravitate to science fiction or futuristic novels. To my surprise, I enjoyed Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines which is set in a post-apocalyptic world and is the first of a series called the Mortal Engines Quartet. Christian Rivers made into a feature film in 2008. Dystopic worlds like the one in Hunger Games and narratives about zombies are popular with young adults – in which, obviously it is youngsters, like them, who have to face the consequences of what the generations before them did. The world is a place their parents, teachers and other adults have totally messed up, and they have to set right. There’s a great deal of violence, to my mind, in some of these. But proper battles; warfare (with or without rules), is apparently seen as inevitable towards defining good and evil, winning and losing – in real life and in storytelling.
London is a traction city. Like several other cities, towns, suburbs, and villages, it is constantly on the move – devouring less powerful places by vanquishing and feeding on them. Resources are scarce, and Municipal Darwinism is the way to go – literally and figuratively. Only North America—the dead continent—and some other parts of the world that suffered a historic defeat after the sixty-year war are stationary, and consist of the anti-traction league. Their aim is to stop roving cities eating up what little resources are left on the planet. Of all these, old tech consisting of the kind of technology we have seen and used in our lifetimes is the most valued resource of all. For, in the post-apocalyptic future world of Reeve, people would kill for motherboards, chips, gizmos, and gadgets before the time of the sixty-year war; archeologists dig them, and historians save them in museums.
The protagonist Tom Natsworthy works in one such museum as an apprentice historian. Historians make up one of four guilds, the other three being the Engineer’s Guild, the Navigators Guild, and the Merchant Guild in London. Tom is punished for disobedience when, instead of working, he sneaks off to join the crowds witnessing London attacking and eating up a small mining town. His boss penalizes him by sending him to the city’s Gut – way down under. London is a vertical city, with a strict socio-economic hierarchy. The Lord Mayor rules and is the Chief Engineer, and poor orphans like Tom are not invited to Top Tier where the upper classes live.
Tom’s adventures begin in the Gut, when he saves the life of his hero, Valentine, the Chief Historian. He receives a blow from Valentine in return for his pains, which sends him down the same chute that Valentine’s attacker, Hester, went through. He lands in the Out Country– a wilderness as dangerous as it is unfamiliar. His only companion is Hester, a young woman with a twisted mouth and a long deep scar across her face. She claims Valentine is a murderer and deserves to be killed. Tom is appalled at the thought that the hero he worships, could have intended to send him to his death. Tom and Hester, who are in complete disagreement, navigate the Out Country on foot, a totally new and ghastly way of transporting himself for Tom, who has lived all his life in a tiered traction city, so has never had to walk in the mud.
They are soon given the chase by Shrike, who raised Hester after she was orphaned. Once her benefactor, Shrike, a man and machine in one has been re-wired by the Lord Mayor and his team of engineers to pursue Hester and Tom and kill them. Tom and Hester’s adventures include being drugged and captured for sale as slaves; rescued by a kindly ‘aviatrics’ in a red coat called Fang, who offers to transport them back to London in her spaceship, the Jenny Hanivier; a battle, in which Tom kills Shrike to save Hester, and their arrival eventually at the frontier of the anti-traction league. By now, Tom and Hester are more than just friends. Here, it becomes evident to Tom that Valentine and the Lord Mayor are indeed working together to wipe out the anti-traction resistance through a deadly weapon they call Medusa. He has begun to believe Hester, when she says that her mother was the one who found the ‘old tech’ that is the brain of Medusa. When she offered to sell it to Valentine, he instead, killed her and her husband, slashed Hester’s face and made off with it, but Hester escaped. Since she was the only witness to the robbery and murders, London’s powers-that-be have to kill Hester. While Valentine has been deputed to fly to the frontier of the anti-tractionists on his spaceship — the Thirteenth-Floor Elevator—to destroy their air fleet, London is rushing wildly to the east to be close enough to the ani-tractionist’s frontier to finish off the job by firing Medusa. In London, Valentine’s beautiful daughter, Kate, much to her horror has had to learn, like Tom that her father is no great hero, but a murderer and a villain. Kate, has, with the support of a lowly engineer, Bevis decided to blow up Medusa before it can be deployed. Defying the strict class hierarchy of London, Bevis and Kate are in love. The inevitable battle between good and evil takes place, with lives sacrificed, changes of hearts and minds, wounds, blood and gore, Stalkers’ claws, death and destruction. Because without the warfare between good and evil, why are we reading?
By now it should be clear that the cocktail of the unfamiliar and familiar makes for fascinating reading. London, the big and the powerful one, consuming and hollowing out small(er) places; London, the vertical city with tiers that provide the physical structure for the hierarchical organization of its people through the class-system; London of the seven tiers, with Top Tier as the smallest of them for the privileged few, crowned by St Paul’s, the only monumental remnant after the sixty-year war; London roaming around like a colossal creature on wheels, ravenous for ‘old tech’ and oil. The same mix of fact and fantasy epitomizes how Reeve portrays characters. Some, like Tom, have human qualities and, besides, are completely recognizable. He is a polite, well-mannered young man; sincere, if quite naïve. He is repulsed by violence, yet must develop and grow into an active participant in it on the battleground of good against evil. On the other hand, Shrike, the stalker, the man-machine has been programmed to kill, but when his motherboard receives a few blows, he undergoes a transformation. Like with all good stories, the balance between plot, character development and setting make for a highly enjoyable read. If you’re a fan of novels with fantasy-rich settings and characters and a neat plot with an unexpected twist at the end, this one is for you!