Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Mortal Engines was written by Philip Reeve and published by eos, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in 2001. It is the first book in Reeve’s The Hungry City Chronicles and it was his first published book.

Mortal Engines is a classic good vs evil YA science fiction novel. 15 year-old orphaned Tom Natsworthy is an Apprentice 3^rd Class in the Guild of Historians in London Museum’s Natural History Section. It is thousands of years forward in time and there are traction cities, those that move around and there are static cities, those like what we live in today. Since resources are finite, the traction cities hunt down smaller municipalities and “eat” them.

“It was natural that cities ate towns, just as the towns ate smaller towns and smaller towns snapped up the miserable static settlements. That was Municipal Darwinism, and it was the way the world had worked for a thousand years, ever since the great engineer Nikolas Quirke had turned London into the first traction city.”

How did we get to this way of living? Thousands of years ago the Ancients destroyed themselves in “orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs” in the Sixty Minute War.

When Tom is sent down to the worst job, to The Gut – where London dismantles the towns it eats – to look for books and antiques for the Historians, the trouble really begins.

At this point, I was vastly worried that when the towns ate other towns, the people died. But, no, not on London’s end, at least not in the beginning of this book, the people are sent into hostels and workhouses.

In The Gut, Tom meets his hero Thaddeus Valentine – London’s most famous archaeologist and Head Historian and writer of future classics : “America Deserta: Across the Dead Continent with Gun, Camera and Airship.” Valentine is tattooed with a blue eye on his forehead, the sign of the Historian Guild. He has with him his beautiful daughter Katherine. In this world the Guild of Engineers are the top dogs, the Lord Mayor Crome also having been an engineer. Engineers are definitely the bad guys and the Historians the good guys.

Along comes Hester Shaw into The Gut, a disfigured orphaned teenager whose entire life’s goal is to kill Valentine (he killed her parents). Tom watches as Hester attempts her vengeance upon Valentine, he rescues Valentine, learns Hester’s name and then is pushed down the waste chute after Hester, by, you-guessed-it Valentine.

The rest of the story, and a very exciting one at that, is a race for Tom and Hester to return to London and get back at Valentine while the Lord Mayor and Valentine want them dead. A Stalker or Resurrected Man (think Terminator) is sent after them and they run into all sorts of characters – aviators, pirates, Mossies (land dwellers) and the Stalker himself. Meanwhile, Katherine Valentine, back at home in London, is determined to find out the truth behind Hester Shaw and her disfigured face and in the process learns the truth about her father. Add to this personal dilemma, Lord Mayor Crome is developing a super-weapon gleaned from fragments of ancient machines that can wipe out other cities in a single blow and he intends on using it.

Reeve is fascinating story-teller and the details he includes in his passages make for a full-sensory experience of the story. Hester is a particularly intriguing character, one-sided at times, but Reeve handles her appearance issues with respect. There is something missing when we know right away that Valentine is not who Katherine and Tom think he is and we only watch Katherine figure this out, rather than figure it out with her. Made me think of Pullman’s The Golden Compass and the villainous mother and how we found out with Lyra what she was really about.

When I first began reading this book, I thought to myself that here was a science fiction book (without aliens) that I could finally recommend to my ten-year-old daughter to read. I told her about the cities eating the other cities and after she asked, assured her that no people died. But as the book goes along, more and more people die and the description of their deaths gets more and more graphic. Characters die that Reeve could have chosen to let live. Even Dog is shot to death. By the end of the book, there is blood everywhere and he never lets you forget it. There is blood all over their clothes, we watch people get their heads cut off and spikes driven through them, we know the colors of all these body fluids and the horrifying details. Fires and bombs burn people alive and nothing is left to the imagination. And I started wondering, what happened to this novel? Why did the author decide to almost fool the reader into thinking she was going to read an exciting science fiction adventure suitable for middle graders, because the sentence structure, the short chapters, the innocence of the characters, the clean language, makes for mid-grade.

It is like one of Mel Gibson’s movies, where no matter how interesting the story, you just don’t want to watch it anymore. You want Gibson to understand that he can NOT show everything and we will GET it. It will be awhile before I try to read any more of The Hungry City Chronicles.

And I’m not against violence in children’s literature, but I am for it being tasteful and left to the imagination. Give the child the choice between having that image set in her mind or not. There were so few choices in Mortal Engines that when one of the main characters dies in the end, tragically and horrifically, it bore no emotion for me, having been desensitized prior to all the other death and tragedy. And that made me very disappointed.