Mortal Engines

Written by Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines builds a preposterous but intriguing world, telling a story with lots of ups and downs, but that ultimately delivers with its great set of characters and surprising worldbuilding.

In the world of Mortal Engines, cities exist on wheels. They’re moving entities that are always looking for prey: here, one city can eat another with its metal contraptions just to take its resources and people. Tom Natsworthy is a youthful apprentice who lives aboard the great moving city of London, which is a brutal predator, and one day he witnesses the man he considers a hero, Thaddeus Valentine, being assaulted by a mysterious young woman. Tom saves Valentine, and is promptly rewarded with… being thrown out of the city. He learned the woman’s name is Hester Shaw, you see, which was problematic for Valentine, but is now useful for Tom, since he’s now stuck with her while trying to find a way back home.

Tom may not seem very complex at first glance, but he soon starts to become a crucial part of the book’s main discussion. At the beginning, he’s just a young and innocent man, who is always dreaming of being a hero and saving a damsel in distress: “If he grew bored, he simply took refuge in a daydream, in which he was a hero who rescued beautiful girls from air-pirates, saved London from the Anti-Traction League and lived happily ever after.” For him, the world is very simple: there are heroes (Valentine) and villains (the Anti-Traction League) and the right order of things is when the strong eat the weak: “But he knew he mustn’t feel sorry for them: it was natural that cities ate towns, just as the towns ate smaller towns, and smaller towns snapped up the miserable static settlements.”

His character arc, then, is simple, but still fascinating: during his adventures with Hester, Tom begins to learn that heroic actions are not always praiseworthy, for London’s success usually means the exploitation and destruction of others. Even the so-called law of the jungle starts to be questioned by the boy, who stops considering it the natural way of the world: “He had been brought up to believe that Municipal Darwinism was a noble, beautiful system, but he could see nothing noble or beautiful about Tunbridge Wheels.”

The fantastical world of Mortal Engines metaphorizes this need for consumption and dominance. It criticizes the imperialistic drive that makes countries wage war against one another, showing cities literally eating others in search of resources and a cheap workforce. That is why Tom’s development is so crucial to the narrative, for in the beginning, he’s just like other Londoners, who cheer at the sight of a chase because they’re the ones doing the chasing: he’s consumed by the exhilarating effect of power, of dominating others. Eating the weak is part of their culture, and they believe that this is the natural order of things, the law of the jungle, and so, “Long Live London.”

Mortal Engines focuses on how the crux problem is not only the governments that perpetuate these acts of violence, but also the common people who cherish them, precisely because they profit from it – people are dying, children are dying, but their lives are getting more comfortable. So, people like Tom start to believe the world is black and white, and that their political adversary is a one-dimensional villain who must be destroyed, for it’s a convenient stance that simplifies and justifies their harm.

It comes as no surprise, then, that when Tom starts to see that someone like the Anti-Traction League is not a monster, he becomes internally divided. He may yell at them, “It’s you who are the barbarians! Why shouldn’t London eat Batmunkh Gompa if it needs to? If you don’t like the idea, you should have put your cities on wheels long ago, like civilized people,” but through his actions, he shows that he doesn’t believe in his own words now. That civilized people eat each other is not something that makes sense for him anymore: he’s noticing the contradiction of a people who think themselves superior, the pinnacle of civilization, and at the same time justify their violent actions by comparing them to how animals supposedly act in nature.

Tom still wants to protect London because it’s his home – so, screw the others, one’s home comes first, he thinks – but the fact that he no longer villainizes the other makes the action of destroying them more difficult, seem less legitimate. He becomes lost, divided, without knowing what to do. He just wants peace now, but London is in perpetual war. It’s still “eat or be eaten” for them. And so they continue to eat.

Besides Tom, the novel contains two more main points of view. One of them is of Valentine’s daughter, Katherine. Her arc is much like Tom’s: she believes her father is a hero and so her quest to find out what’s happening in her city ends up opening her eyes to the darker side of Valentine, showing how his search for power at the detriment of others is a symbol of what London truly represents.

Katherine has her heart in the right place and it’s no wonder that she is startled every time she watches her fellow countrymen root for the destruction of others: “From Circle Park and all the observation platforms came the sound of wordless voices, and she thought at first that they were crying out in horror, the way she wanted to – but no; they were cheering, cheering, cheering.” After all, to the eyes of those with empathy, rooting for violence always seems like madness.

But Katherine’s arc eventually gains more elements as she progresses in her investigation. She also becomes aware of her own social privileges, for example, (“Beside her she heard Pod say again, ‘Sorry, Miss Valentine,’ and wasn’t sure if he was sorry because he couldn’t help her or sorry for her because she had learned the truth of what life was like under London.”) and of the injustices of a capitalist society (“All she could think of were the thousands of Londoners who were toiling and dying in misery so that a few lucky, wealthy people like herself could live in comfort.”).

The third and final point of view is of Hester Shaw, a young woman consumed by revenge who wants more than anything to kill Thaddeus Valentine. Hester’s description is not the usual kind for her role as a heroine: one of the first words used by the narrator to describe her is hideous, for example, and he doesn’t stop there:

“She was no older than Tom, and she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump and her single eye stared at him out of the wreckage, as grey and chill as a winter sea.”

Hester’s tragedy is that she allowed Valentine to define her life until the events of the book. She’s not allowed to be happy or even to simply smile because her only goal is to murder the guy. She can’t think of anything else, and she has no other plans. And she’s aware of that: she even embraces the prospect of giving her life to fulfill her mission.

It’s fascinating to see how Tom’s mind is so ingrained by toxic masculinity that Hester’s personality appears alien to him. For Tom, women are fragile, gentle ladies. Someone who would care for him after he did the manly duty of providing and protecting her: the actions of a hero. However, Hester is self-sufficient and rude, and she’s usually the one who is doing the protecting. Near her, Tom looks infantilized and naïve: he’s the one who cries, who’s not able to fend for himself, and there’s a moment where he even pees in his pants. He dreamed of a damsel in distress and found Hester, who says fiercely, “I don’t need anybody.”

The novel only falters when it comes to a cyborg named Shrike, who seems out of place in that world and doesn’t bring too much to the table: he’s there to provide some tension to certain scenes and a bit of pathos to Hester’s story, and that’s it. Besides that, certain lexical choices are… distracting: a certain language being called “airsperanto,” for example, made me cringe, while a character without any importance being named “Dr. Nasghul” made me laugh out loud.

With a fascinating narrative that raises some relevant social discussions, Mortal Engines is a pretty good fantasy novel, which will hopefully mark the start of an excellent series.

September 11, 2025.