Book Review

The Hungry City Chronicles series, by Philip Reeve. Harper Collins:

Mortal Engines (2003), paper, $6.99

Predator's Gold (2004), hardcover $16.99, paper $7.99 available February 2006

Infernal Devices (2006) hardcover $16.99 release date June, 2006

by Carol Van Strum

Crumbling bricks and clay tablets are not the only record left by long-dead civilizations. Speaking directly to us across the reaches of time are their stories, the poignant echoes of lessons learned too late. Details change with generations of re-telling, but their themes recur intact in every culture. We call them folk tales and tuck them away in quaint picture books, relics of childhood left behind with the tooth fairy and Easter Bunny. We would do well to dig them out of the closet and listen.

One of the most enduring themes, retold in lively variations world-wide, evokes the precautionary principle so eloquently articulated by Ronald Wright. We know it best as a Disney cartoon of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, but the moral - take heed lest the blessing become a curse, the wonderful tool unleash disaster -- is likely as old as the first cave dweller to burn his bed making fire. Whether the tool be a broom, a hoe, a salt mill, or a spear that kills game until there's nothing left to eat, the message across the millennia is the same. In one African variant, a race of giants who choose to bear only sons blesses itself into extinction.

Today's boldest storytellers dare to tell the stories our own civilization might bequeath its ragged survivors. Philip Reeve's Hungry City series vividly portrays a planet still blighted thousands of years after the legendary global crash of the twenty-first century. With most of Earth's surface too depleted and toxic to support life, humanity survives on giant mobile traction cities, cannibalizing other roving towns for resources in the grotesque exercise of Municipal Darwinism.

Fittingly, Reeve's hero, Tom, is an apprentice historian assigned to sift the debris of an ancient catastrophe so total that not even its stories survived (though there is an unconfirmed legend about pot noodles). The exalted role of the Historians' Guild is to retrieve useful technologies of the past and study what went wrong to prevent it ever happening again. Human nature, however, has advanced little since Cro-Magnon annihilated Neanderthal. In a shattering moment of truth, Tom discovers the hidden agenda of his guild's beloved master, who is secretly reconstructing the very weapons and technologies that destroyed the ancient world. The lethal sirens of wealth and power once more drown the warnings of history.

Hair-raising chases, humor, a dash of romance, and explosive reversals lend Tom's adventures all the elements of a classic thriller. What distinguishes the non-stop action is its settings, the achingly familiar landscapes corrupted beyond redemption, the jeweled planet now tarnished and befouled. With a Dickensian eye for brutal, unsparing detail, Reeve gleefully charts our trajectory into a nightmare future, romping through the mess with the guilty astonishment of an unhousebroken puppy.

Reeve's books are billed as young adult fare, an ironic commentary on the hardened, formulaic arteries of the adult market. His most endearing characters do not fit readily into categorical pigeonholes of good and evil, hero or villain; at their worst and their best, they are imperfect beings groping toward some ideal of the human, with every blunder leaping for a chance to get it right next time. If that's a childish world view, it's time we stopped growing up.

 

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