Mortal Engines Review

This week's novel is the YA steampunk Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.  This book is getting a movie adaptation, and my husband showed me the trailer, saying, "You've read this book, right?"  I hadn't.  But now I have.

After the apocalypse, where there were earthquakes and tidal waves and all sorts of natural disasters, cities became mobile to survive, and now they roll around the wasteland searching for smaller cities to eat and take their resources.  But these days the hunting ground is running dry of small cities and to survive, London's mayor and head historian, Valentine, have a plan to use a death ray to burst through a mountain stronghold and make its way into Asia, which is populated by static cities and easy pickings.  The story follows Hester Shaw, who has sworn vengeance on Valentine, who disfigured her and killed her parents.  She gets teamed up with Tom, a London apprentice historian who idolizes London and gets thrown off the city in the first couple of chapters, and together they have to work their way back to London, although they have very different motives for doing so.

This is going to make an epic movie, because the set dressing is the big draw here.  The world building has a great aesthetic.  There are several London landmarks that are still around from the London we know, but steampunk-ified.  The city was stacked like a cake into nine layers, where there are still squares and parks and museums.  St. Paul's Cathedral is on the top tier, but it was never meant to be moved around, so it's covered in scaffolding. 

I like the idea that they created movable cities, but I never really understood why they run around and eat each other.  I guess they take the resources from the smaller cities, but I don't understand how that could possibly sustain a city the size of London, and it implies that the small cities got their resources from somewhere.  This ecosystem doesn't feel sustainable.  But then that's kind of the point: they're running out of small cities to eat.  And another part of the equation is that they don't have to be movable.  There are anti-traction cities who have figured out that the city-eat-city way of life is not sustainable, and it's an issue late in the book that this way of life is all the people of London know and that's their whole motivation to keep doing it.  And really that's enough motivation.

There was some technical stuff that struck me funny.  The book is written in the past tense except for when you're in a section that focuses on a bad guy.  Then it's suddenly in present tense, even though it's happening sequentially with the past tense sections with Hester and Tom.  Every time I had to stop and go, "Wait, this is written in the present tense?  I hadn't noticed that until just now!"   And then I'd flip back a page and go, "Wait.  No."  At first I attributed this to the fact that the bad guy these sections focused on was a robot monster with little understanding of his own past, some present tense for him would make sense.  But then it does the same thing with Valentine and the mayor, so I don't know.  The point of view is also strange.  It could be omniscient, with large sweeping views of history and what different cities are up to, but then it zooms in to what I would call close third, only to switch to a close third of someone else in a way that always threw me out for a moment.  Some chapters are broken up into sections, switching from one point of view to another with a section break, and that makes it really strange when it switches point of view midstream.  But then maybe it was all setting a precedent for one particular, well executed moment when a character dies, and you're thrown from their point of view to someone else's.

One thing I really like is that towards the end, you sympathize with the different sides of the conflict enough that you realize there is not perfect outcome.  It made the ending wonderfully messy and human and tragic.

***

Next week: Rootabaga Stories, fairy tales begging to be read aloud, by Carl Sandburg.