Mortal Engines
 |
| Harper Collins |
2001
“Is it...dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...”
At first glance, illustrator Phillip Reeve's debut novel Mortal Engines doesn't look like the type of fiction a well-respecting adult reader would be seen in public with, but my desire to try and catch upwith my reading pile meant that I was cramming brief bits of reading where ever I could. I'd been looking forward to getting to the book for some time now, specifically to try and fill a particularly-sized gap that I felt in my reading appetite; that for a bit of young adult fiction. I'm a big proponent of the potential of the genre to create the right type of atmosphere for an author to create amazing fantasy, and there's no better example of this than Phillip Pullman's truly epic His Dark Materials trilogy, where Pullman dramatically pulled his readers through an intense inter-dimensional adventure with philosophical and religious themes playing out across an amazing, neo-classical setting. I was looking for an imagination as vast as that, and the premise of Mortal Engines captured my attention.
I was probably most attracted by the promise of steampunk; that curious artistic mixture of classical Victorian design reinterpreted in futuristic ways. Mortal Engines is set thousands of years from the present, in a post-apocalyptic future where devastating war has changed life as we know it, and destroyed most knowledge of the past. While computers and other electronics no longer exist, the mad scientists of the future have turned the very cities they live in into almost unrecognisable machinery. Each city is placed upon huge constructed tank tracks, that connect to immense steam engines that propel them across the desert planes. With natural resources extremely scarce, each city and town is forced to prey upon smaller ones. The city of London is one of these; larger than most but not invulnerable.
Reeves refrains from giving every detail of this world immediately, leaving plenty of mysteries unsolved even at the end of this book (which is the first in a series of three). He narrows the perspective on this amazing world when he introduces his unassuming main character, a young orphan named Tom. It's through Tom's perspective and experiences that things become a lot more simplified and typical; I'm not sure if this is a slight or not, but Reeve's portrayal of Tom is hardly original; for one he's an orphan, and all orphans in all books ever always eventually overcome the odds. In other developments common to all children's literature, Tom quickly becomes tightly wrapped-up in a major conspiracy involving the adults he knows, where he and his friends go against the odds to do what's right. It's oddly comfortable, in the spirit of Harry Potter and all that.
It's because of this that I enjoyed the book; though the adventure is fast-paced and exciting, and the plot full of twists (without giving too much away, Tom finds out that the leaders of London aren't quite as benevolent as they like to appear and are planning on using some rediscovered olde tech to conquor their enemies via killing masses of innocents) Reeve's writing remains fairly simple. In some respects it's limited, far behind the narrative mastery of Phillip Pullman and lacking the emotional power of J.K. Rowling's books, but it does retain a sense of wonder and majesty suited to the uncanny backdrop of events. At some point I'll certainly pick up the second book in the series, with some hope that Phillip Reeve's talents as a writer grew with experience.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...”
At first glance, illustrator Phillip Reeve's debut novel Mortal Engines doesn't look like the type of fiction a well-respecting adult reader would be seen in public with, but my desire to try and catch upwith my reading pile meant that I was cramming brief bits of reading where ever I could. I'd been looking forward to getting to the book for some time now, specifically to try and fill a particularly-sized gap that I felt in my reading appetite; that for a bit of young adult fiction. I'm a big proponent of the potential of the genre to create the right type of atmosphere for an author to create amazing fantasy, and there's no better example of this than Phillip Pullman's truly epic His Dark Materials trilogy, where Pullman dramatically pulled his readers through an intense inter-dimensional adventure with philosophical and religious themes playing out across an amazing, neo-classical setting. I was looking for an imagination as vast as that, and the premise of Mortal Engines captured my attention.
I was probably most attracted by the promise of steampunk; that curious artistic mixture of classical Victorian design reinterpreted in futuristic ways. Mortal Engines is set thousands of years from the present, in a post-apocalyptic future where devastating war has changed life as we know it, and destroyed most knowledge of the past. While computers and other electronics no longer exist, the mad scientists of the future have turned the very cities they live in into almost unrecognisable machinery. Each city is placed upon huge constructed tank tracks, that connect to immense steam engines that propel them across the desert planes. With natural resources extremely scarce, each city and town is forced to prey upon smaller ones. The city of London is one of these; larger than most but not invulnerable.
Reeves refrains from giving every detail of this world immediately, leaving plenty of mysteries unsolved even at the end of this book (which is the first in a series of three). He narrows the perspective on this amazing world when he introduces his unassuming main character, a young orphan named Tom. It's through Tom's perspective and experiences that things become a lot more simplified and typical; I'm not sure if this is a slight or not, but Reeve's portrayal of Tom is hardly original; for one he's an orphan, and all orphans in all books ever always eventually overcome the odds. In other developments common to all children's literature, Tom quickly becomes tightly wrapped-up in a major conspiracy involving the adults he knows, where he and his friends go against the odds to do what's right. It's oddly comfortable, in the spirit of Harry Potter and all that.
It's because of this that I enjoyed the book; though the adventure is fast-paced and exciting, and the plot full of twists (without giving too much away, Tom finds out that the leaders of London aren't quite as benevolent as they like to appear and are planning on using some rediscovered olde tech to conquor their enemies via killing masses of innocents) Reeve's writing remains fairly simple. In some respects it's limited, far behind the narrative mastery of Phillip Pullman and lacking the emotional power of J.K. Rowling's books, but it does retain a sense of wonder and majesty suited to the uncanny backdrop of events. At some point I'll certainly pick up the second book in the series, with some hope that Phillip Reeve's talents as a writer grew with experience.
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