I always bring a book with me when I go on holidays, not only for the journeys, but for the quiet wind-down times I always need before going to sleep, or early in the morning before heading out into the strange and wonderful world of not-home. On a recent trip I brought with me a novel currently soaring up the best-seller lists and getting rave reviews in ‘quality’ newspapers. But it turned out to be the kind of book where you have to keep going back pages to remind yourself who a character is or where a place is because all the characters and settings are the same. The baddies were too unrelievedly bad and the goodies were too smugly good, the setting and milieu so thin and flat and the twists so unsatisfactory (because the characters all failed what Helena Close calls the ‘make me care’ test) that I wondered if the book was written by Artifical Intelligence. I finished it and gave it to a second-hand bookshop so I didn’t have to carry it home. But that didn’t solve my problem of what to read. Finding Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines on my daughter’s bookshelf, however, did.
When she moved away, my daughter brought some of her favourite books to keep her company, and Mortal Engines was one of them. Normally I don’t engage with fantasy/invented worlds and Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games and so on left me completely cold – though I loved Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights . But Mortal Engines hooked me from the very beginning because it starts like this:
It was a dark, blustery evening in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
In happier times, London would never have bothered with such feeble prey.The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting far bigger towns than this….But lately prey of any kind had started to grow scarce, and some of the larger cities had started to look hungrily at London.For ten years now it had been hiding from them, skulking in a damp, mountainous western district which the Guild of Historians said had once been the island of Britain. For ten years it had eaten nothing but tiny farming towns and static settlements in those wet hills.
It is two thousand years after the Sixty-Minute War in which the Ancients (that’s us) destroyed the world, and now the dominant political trend is Municipal Darwinism, whereby big cities stay on the move and ‘eat’ smaller ones. They clamp the cities in their huge metal jaws, destroy or recycle the city’s machinery and buildings, and enslave or – in the case of London – pauperise the inhabitants of these doomed travelling settlements. Cities are mounted on huge traction wheels that drag them across the mud-flats of former seas, or the thick ice of the Ice Wastes. (Global warming has come and gone in the two millenia, it seems.) There are bigger cities than London, such as Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, and Arkangel in the second book of the series, Predator’s Gold. There are small, fierce little raiding/trading cities like Tunbridge Wheels, and sedate, non-aggressive cities like Anchorage (in the second book). There are amphibious towns which can travel on water as well. There are aviators with airships like gondolas under balloons, and cities in the sky. As many things as possible have been salvaged and recycled from the Ancient times, but there are no computers and no modern telecommunications – though there are cctv cameras. Like the world of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (which is set in the nearer future) enough of our contemporary culture is retained to make the world just about recognisable, although historians have a hard job piecing the past together from bits and pieces. Tom Natsworthy is an apprentice historian in London, a huge eight-tiered city run by Engineers. Up top and on most of the layers, there are streets and houses and recognisable remnants of the old city, but down in the Gut, as it is called, the Salvagemen reign supreme, tough old birds who disassemble the towns and cities that are eaten. In a grimmer part of the underworld, criminals labour in sewage farms and robotic, part-humans, Stalkers, are constructed from their corpses. At the start of Mortal Engines Tom falls (literally) from favour into the mud below the city, with a one-eyed girl, Hester, and away they go on adventures, in an airship called the Jenny Haniver, with the brave Anna Fang. She is part of a body called the Anti-Traction League representing static settlements and people who oppose Municipal Darwinism, and there is plenty of action. The bad people perish, and so do some of the good people (no spoilers), and historians are unlikely heroes, even the stuffy Chudleigh Pomeroy. And somehow the book ends on a note of hope, with a great closing line from one-eyed Hester as she escapes with Tom in the Jenny Haniver:
‘You aren’t a hero, and I’m not beautiful, and we probably aren’t going to live happily ever after…..But we’re alive, and together, and we’re probably going to be all right.’
The sequels take up their story, but the book can stand alone too. Another description in Mortal Engines that deserves to be quoted, is the destruction (by a triumphant London where evil has gained the upper hand) of a city by the Medusa device rediscovered and rebuilt from ancient blueprints(probably a nuclear bomb). First there’s a high-pitched whining roar, then:
The night split apart and went rushing away to hide in the corners of the sky.For a second Katherine saw the towers of the distant conurbation limned in fire, and then it was gone. A pulse of brightness lifted from the earth, blinding white, then red, a pillar of fire rushing up in silence into the sky, and across the flame-lit snow the sound-wave came rolling,a low, long-drawn-out boom as if a great door had been slammed shut somewhere in the depths of the earth.
I couldn’t read this book quickly, and I had to keep putting it down, to imagine the range and complexity of the world Reeve describes. Huge, mobile cities are not beyond the bounds of possibility, when you reflect on how complex our ‘static’ societies have become, with motorways and spaghetti junctions and tangles of railways and the hidden grids of water and electricity provision, and the mechanics of food production and delivery, not to mention all those highways in the air we take completely for granted.
I think, though, that my mind was already opened to fantasy and alternative universes by Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch which I had just finished before travelling. It is the best new novel I’ve read since Alice MacDermott’s Absolution. At the beginning of Nonesuch, Iris, who works as a secretary in a stockbroker’s office in the City, is going to met one of her paramours, Charlie. It is August 1939. Iris has a number of such boyfriends, who wine and dine and bed her (she uses a Dutch cap for birth control) in posh, discreet hotels. This time, upper-class Charlie brings her, satin-gowned and glamorous, to meet a stockbroker friend of his, Miles and his intended, Eleanor, a sculptor, in a little Italian restaurant in Soho. Iris isn’t meant for real-life encounters with one’s real-life friends, and Charlie’s embarrassment turns to anger when she talks to Miles about the stockmarket as if she knows what she’s talking about. (She absolutely does). Eleanor, sizing up the situation, stages a loo-break escape for the two girls to a club in Fitzrovia, where Iris meets and gets off with Geoff and makes an enemy of the frosty, upper-class Lall who will prove to be a formidable adversary later on. Class, as always in English novels, is clearly delineated. Iris is from Watford, the daughter of a City messenger, one of an almost-hereditary class of financial-district employees: ‘solid, reliable men who could be trusted to carry from building to building documents worth ten times the wages the City would pay them in their whole working lives’. After she beds the virgin Geoff in his father’s house in Hampstead, she has a very frightening supernatural experience, and the real action of the novel takes off from there. Dark forces, harnessed to Mosley’s Blackshirts, have to be defeated and Iris is the girl for the job. And she falls in love with the gentle Geoff, and stops sleeping around, and starts to take responsibility for his hapless father when Geoff is called up – getting the old man his rations and so on. (This is realistic – women always end up doing this kind of thing.) The writing is arrestingly vivid and only Sarah Waters in The Night Watch comes near evoking the Blitz in such heartbreaking detail. The fallout from Dunkirk also features, and there is a beautiful Christmas Eve Midnight Mass in Chelsea. Parallel with all this, the book isabout the fight against evil, and time-travel features too. I usually find time-travel distressing but it works in this book. I was trying to find a quote to illustrate the beauty of the writing but couldn’t choose – it is all so good that I had to restrain myself from re-reading it the minute I finished it.
Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines (London: Scholastic 2003) and Predator’s Gold (London: Scholastic 2005). These are YA (Young Adult) books, which is probably why I overlooked them before. But a lot of YA fiction is brilliant and original. I am really looking forward to the sequels, which are all on the bookshelves here.
Francis Spufford, Nonesuch (London: Faber 2026).
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago 2006).
Alice MacDermott, Absolution (London: Bloomsbury 2023).
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic 1995).
The Very Bad Novel I wasted time and eyesight on, shall remain nameless. Who knows? Someone else might enjoy it.
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