The "Mortal Engines" Quartet

Notes:

Welcome to our world, but so far ahead that the characters’ distant past is our distant future. This is the canvas on which Philip Reeve has painted the world of the Mortal Engines quartet. In many respects it’s a much less technological world than our own, largely the result of one particularly devastating conflict: the 60-Minute War which left vast areas of the planet uninhabitable. Since that time, empires have risen and fallen and the debris they left behind is plundered by explorers for Old Tech to supplement their effective but limited technology. Two technologies dominate: land-crawling traction cities; and sophisticated airships.

However the author isn’t so much interested in the mechanics of a fictional time and place as in its use as a backdrop for a human story with a more-than-slightly Edwardian flavour to it. There’s something about the late Victorian and Edwardian milieux which draws children’s authors again and again. It provides the perfect combination of energy and initiative, combined with an outburst of engineering prowess. It’s a setting where gentlemen explorers and dashing aviatrices bring back mysterious finds from exotic places. Where rather larger-than-life characters stride across the stage in front of a brightly-coloured backdrop.

Why do I like the Mortal Engines series so much? Because the author depicts a world which is both recognisable and imaginatively different. And populates it with characters who are intelligible but not two-dimensional, complex but not irritatingly so. I have some reservations about certain aspects of the series; not many, but enough to prevent my recommending it one hundred percent. Nevertheless this is an enjoyable, engaging and mostly wholesome series for young teenagers.

The whole story revolves around the characters of Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw. I don’t know if specific ages are mentioned, but they’re both about 15 in the first book, about 17 in the second, and in their 30s in the final two-book story when their daughter Wren is herself 15. Tom is an idealist, an Historian by training, orphaned when his parents were killed in an accident. He is inclined to think the best of everyone and is concerned and compassionate. Hester is mistrusting, embittered, solitary and ruthless, but she comes to love Tom fiercely. She harbours a hatred for Valentine who killed her parents and left her brutally scarred and she is devastated when she discovers that he is her biological father. This relationship haunts her throughout the books and she allows herself to be consumed by her “heritage” as the daughter of a ruthless killer, keeping it a secret from Tom who’s horrified when he discovers how readily she kills people.

The two of them make for fascinating characters, vital and strongly marked, deeply in love with each other in spite of their many differences. Each keeps at least one significant secret from the other: Hester, that she brought the Huntsman of Arkangel to Anchorage; Tom, that he’s dying from the bullet wound Pennyroyal gave him on that same occasion. Their daughter Wren comes to know both secrets and the moment of anger when she lets one of them slip tears her parents apart. Tom & Hester do finally come together again, and while their ending is tragic, the overall story ends in hope, not in despair.

By the time we meet Wren at the start of the third book, Tom & Hester are married – although it’s not clear when this occurs: Wren came about while they were travelling together in the Jenny Haniver. However, marriage and families definitely happen in the world of Mortal Engines. Hester’s own parents were married and so were Tom’s and both characters suffer from the circumstances which left them orphans. This attitude to family is something of a touchstone for the outlook of the series as a whole. This is not a dystopian future where society has broken down and is driven by moral indifference. On the contrary, this world is imbued with a sort of positive humanism and even a sense of Religion, or at least an Afterlife. People are polite to one another, old and young. (I love the way Tom insists on calling the cyborg killing machine “Mr Shrike”). Youngsters are given responsibilities of their own at an early age and are excited by the thought of adventure while not losing sight of their family and home.

There are certainly differences between the distinct cultures: the scientifically-stratified societies of the Traction Cities, driven by Municipal Darwinism, are very much in contrast to the more homely African land-based family of Theo Ngoni. And different again are the militaristic Anti-Traction league who have been at war with the Traction Cities for a long time and for whom winning the conflict overrides every other consideration. But time and again it is the bonds of family which are given pride of place over and above the mechanical ideas of the engineering class.

In a grace note late in the saga as London prepares for a rebirth, one of the Engineers regrets that she never knew the son she had to give up to the City nurseries according to the practice of the Guild of Engineers. She assumes that her son died when London blew up, but we realise that he was the Bevis Pod who stood up against the inhuman practices of the Engineers and died helping Kate Valentine sabotage the MEDUSA device. And his mother, years later, unwittingly complements his work by helping to build the new London inspired by peace and solidarity and not by greed.

That humanity is at the centre of the series’ worldview is evident also in the technology: it’s the kind of rig-up that you could imagine appearing in the early 20th Century if the idea of moving cities had gained traction, or if the airship industry had taken off. Things which enough people with enough effort and time could put together with their own hands. There are instances of higher-tech tech – the Scabious Spheres for example which power Anchorage – but they are viewed with some suspicion, the more so after the disastrous effects of London’s bid for power with MEDUSA and they are not really understood, merely employed. The technology of the Stalkers is likewise copied from the original designs found hidden in the High Ice. Improvements are made, but there is no radical step forward, merely a more-or-less imaginative tinkering with existing technology.

In more than one respect, the series can be viewed as the triumph of the human over the technological and a warning against too great a reliance on technology. The whole world was devastated by the 60-Minute War long in the past before these stories, and whether it’s overambitious Engineers or ruthless cyborgs who get their hands on some of the same weaponry, the result is equally devastating. Significantly it is the human remnant of the Stalker Fang, given impetus by the satellite images of Theo and Wren in distant London, which sets the orbital ODIN weapon to self-destruct before the inhuman cyborg could take over again.

And this brings us to a particular aspect of these stories: the Cyborgs; the Stalkers. Early on in the first story we encounter the mysterious Shrike who has a soft spot for Hester to the extent that he wants to make her like him. His behaviour and his thoughts which the author allows us to hear raise questions which turn up again and again: how much of a person is organic memory – images, recollected sounds and words – and how much is something else. The story doesn’t really come down completely on one side or the other. Time and again the Stalker Fang insists that Anna Fang is no more, that any resemblance to her is merely organic. Other characters take the same line, including Oenone who has to “resurrect” her own dead brother’s body for the cyborg corps. But both Fang and Shrike, the two Stalkers we see the most of, are strongly affected by human images which resonate within them. At the final story’s climax the Stalker Fang is definitely responding to an appeal to her humanity although it’s really up to the reader to decide whether there is anything of the person who was Anna Fang or whether the cyborg’s complex circuitry is simply confused by the effect on it of the appeal to humanity.

One point for the more squeamish to note is that some of the scenes in the Stalker workshops are quite grisly, as the cadavers of captured or killed soldiers are turned into cyborg warriors. Birds and other creatures are also converted, and the former Chief Technician has turned his retirement home into a menagerie of the grotesque.

I must admit to being pleasantly surprised by the presence of religious belief in the series as a whole, and of the positive effect of Christianity in the final two books in particular. Religion rarely gets much of a fair deal in sci-fi. Mostly it’s just ignored – assumed to have died out as mankind evolves beyond such primitive needs. Here there are frequent references to gods and religions. True, some are humorous backreferences (“Thatcher, the many-armed goddess of Capitalism”) or rote exclamations. But many characters have some kind of belief in an afterlife: the Sunless Conutry from which, proverbially, no-one returns.

This belief, however perfunctory, in an aspect of the person apart from the body would be interesting enough. But more interesting still is the conversion of Oenone Zero to Christianity and the effect that this has on the War. Oenone, seeking solace, goes to the street which houses shrines and chapels of various beliefs. She’s drawn to one in particular, somehow identifying with the God whose own people had him hung up on a cross to die. Fast-forwarding, the now-Christian Oenone marries General Naga (in a Christian wedding ceremony) and, informed and empowered by her new-found faith, convinces him that peace and forgiveness is the answer and not war. It’s by no means plain sailing from there on, but it’s a truly surprising facet of the series and a touching one.

I’ve focused above on some more serious aspects of the books, but these things alone, however, noble, don’t provide all the enjoyment which is to be had. The characters are straightforward while the storylines are engaging and interesting, the tension is powerful in places without being inappropriate for younger readers. And the stories achieve their lightest and most enjoyable touch in the subtle humour and occasional backreferences which are present throughout the books. This is a difficult balance to achieve: How much do you keep the humour going when the business at hand is serious? How many passing references do you make to our day-and-age without overplaying your hand?

The author has pitched it just right. There’s humour to be found in the names of the Traction Cities (look out for Tunbridge Wheels and Wolverinehampton, the hunter-killer suburb, for example) and in the overblown antics of larger-than-life characters with comical names such as the fraudster Pennyroyal and the scheming Widgery Blinkoe with his five wives. And there are dashing aviatrices with quirkily-named flying machines. And undersized servants who literally change their hat to carry out different roles in an understaffed city. And as well as Old Tech discoveries by archaelogists in our distant future, there are references to our times (“What did they do with all these CeeDees?”) and a scattering of cultures not so very far removed from our own, although Europe has become a Hunting Ground and traction cities cross salt plains where the North Sea used to be.

There is a sour note in the final act of the saga which disappointed me and which was only partly counteracted by the definitely hopeful epilogue. Tom, whose heart was weakened years before when Pennyroyal shot him, has used all his strength to try to broker peace between the Green Storm and the Traction Cities. Having failed in this attempt, he makes a last journey with Hester to prevent the Stalker Fang from using ODIN to ignite a volcanic chain reaction. Although they succeed, Tom dies in the attempt and Hester, unable to live without him, takes her own life. This final action is consonant with her character throughout: driven by a bitterness which is tempered only by her wholehearted love for Tom. It seems that she really can’t live without him. I can’t criticise the scene dramatically, and her final words hold out her hope of being reunited with Tom in the Sunless Country to which she’s previously paid lip-service. I just wish that there might have been some more redemptive outcome for her.

In the last analysis the message of the Mortal Engines stories is one of hope, hope nourished by genuine human endeavour and in some way by Christian charity and forgiveness. The whole series is enjoyable and well-paced, populated by engaging and vivid characters. I regret the very slight uncertainty over the question of Tom & Hester’s marriage, and the concession to romantic suicide in the final act. But it’s rare enough to find a story which accepts that Religion has a part to play in people’s lives, and rarer still to find one in which it is the catalyst for good.