Mortal Engines

Philip Reeve
Mortal Engines.
London, 2001, Scholastic.
0439979439

Two features push this children's book well out of the ordinary, and make it well worth adult attention.

The first is its central idea, well imagined and well executed. This is a future, 1000 years after a cataclysmic global war in which North America was wiped out. In the struggle to survive the aftermath, towns and cities uprooted themselves and became mobile, hunting each other across Europe (which includes the continental shelf, for the war seems to have evaporated much of the oceans). It's like reading a bizarre natural history by David Attenborough: London hides in the foothills, evading the bigger and hungrier predator conurbations like Bayreuth; harried by smaller, faster predator suburbs; darting out to snap up mining towns; they have a name for it - "Municipal Darwinism". It may sound naff, but it works and is mesmerising.

The second feature is that our hero (Tom Natsworthy, third class apprentice historian) undergoes moral crisis and revulsion. He kills to save his friend, but is sickened by the necessity and by the action. When he realises that his own city is set on a morally indefensible course he acts against it, but not without despair at his treachery. He is afraid, he often wants to run away and sometimes does so; he sometimes fails those who rely upon him, and his self redemption is hard-won. He is a thoroughly unusual hero for a children's book: thoroughly real, thoroughly flawed, thoroughly believable, ultimately admirable.