Inspiring Young Readers
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
Let me start by saying that this book was an absolute joy – full of energy, pace, thrills, spills and action that never flags for a moment. In many ways it’s a good, old fashioned adventure story that has the perfect recipe of young heroes, villainous villains, mad scientists, pirates (although maybe not the traditional kind) and a crazy plot that has to be foiled. But although this is a story that Robert Louis Stevenson would have been proud to write, it has elements in it that he could never have included in his books.
Although this story is set in the future, it doesn’t have the feel of science fiction. It’s a future where technology is simultaneously more advanced and less advanced than we recognise – a paradox that is best summed up by the term ‘steampunk’. Steampunk is a term that has been adopted to describe the blending of the old technologies that are the stuff of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells and the new technologies of more modern science fiction. This hybrid creates a genre of its own into which Reeve’s novel fits nicely.
Reeve is also even more ruthless than the old storytellers and without wishing to give away key twists in the plot, he doesn’t hesitate to dispose of a character when the logic of the action demands it. Some of these quite brutal moments really took me by surprise – there’s no-one likely to accuse Reeve of patronising his audience.
The central character in the book is Tom Natsworthy who is an apprentice in the guild of Historians – one of the four guilds that keep the future London going. However, this London isn’t the one we know – it’s a ‘traction’ city, one that roams around on huge mobile hydraulics looking for small towns to hunt down and dismantle for its resources. Tom idolises the head of his Guild – Valentine – and is entranced at the beauty of his daughter. One day circumstances conspire to bring Tom and Valentine together in the same place and when Tom saves him from an attempted assassination by a young girl with a strangely disfigured face he is expecting to be praised – but that’s where he’s wrong and where his extraordinary adventures begin.
Tom and the would-be assassin, Hester, find themselves grudgingly dependent on each other and facing threats and enemies at every turn as they battle to try and get back to London. There’s the enigmatic and beautiful spy, Miss Fang, part of the ‘anti-traction’ alliance who has her own airship, pirate towns who want to sell them as slaves and all the time they are being stalked by a zombie killer half human half robot who has been sent to kill them.
What, you might ask, makes them targets for such treatment? Well, they know about Enigma.... and that’s dangerous knowledge. But it’s also the key to why the city of London is heading off into east into Europe on its secret mission.
Reeve initially thought of this book as a stand alone story but he went on to write another three in the sequence and I’ve read critics who think that some of these later ones are even better that Mortal Engines. If that’s true it will be great fun to read the rest and see where this story heads.
I can see children and young teenagers who are keen on immersive adventure stories would be drawn into this world of predatory cities and I would strongly recommend it with the one caveat that the violence can sometimes be graphic and might be an issue for some younger readers.
Terry Potter
July 2016