Thunder City, Philip Reeve (£8.99, Scholastic)
Gladiatorial combat, kidnapping, cyberbeasts, political coups, secrets, surprises and killer robots: Thunder City has it all. As Philip Reeve recently revealed in an interview for IT he set himself the task of returning to his popular world of Mortal Engines a century before his other books. So, all new characters and some political, historical and social back stories feature in this mixed-up world of mobile cities and anti-computer beliefs.
One of the new characters, Tamzin Pook, is a star of the circus in the floating city of Margate, where she and other participants fight and kill whatever new beasts have been created by their evil master. He is a bit fed up with the attention she is getting, her success rate of kills, the fact she is still alive; she is on a guilt trip about the death of a colleague she failed to defend.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, a violent political coup takes place in the small city of Thornbury and a previously retiring tutor, Miss Torpenhow, somehow finds the courage to escape and round up a somewhat ramshackle gang to put things right. The disinterested male heir of the dead Mayor of Thornbury, the aforementioned Ms. Pook, a retired solider who is more than partial to a drink or seven, and a somewhat pretentious and self-obsessed artist, gradually find the inclination and a way to recapture Thornbury and thwart Gabriel Stega’s dastardly plans.
Sometimes this is almost despite themselves. Miss Torpenhow takes a while to get her head around the fact that the rules of Social Darwinism are being broken and that cities are attacking and ‘eating’ other cities rather than combining and evolving by agreement. Max only reluctantly takes on any civic duties or responsibility and Tamzin learns to think and care as much as attack and overcome. They all learn about survival, sneakiness, co-operation and the wider world.
En route there are problems galore, usually presented in a cliffhanger way at the end of chapters. Plot is what drives this book, however, and as is often the case, solutions tend to arrive soon in the next few pages. There are self-sabotaging moments of stupidity too, sometimes told in a laugh-aloud manner; and a fantastic double act of a kind-of-friendly robot and its pet kitten.
This isn’t the best Mortal Engines book, but it is a pacy, exciting read that paves the way for a new series of adventures. This incarnation of Reeve’s strange steampunk world is vividly brought to life and inhabited, the baddies are truly dastardly, dishonest and deviant. Although there is – of course – a happy ending, with a sense of restored order and cafés re-opening, there is also the clear flagging-up of future possibilities, which is of course exactly what is wanted.
.
Rupert Loydell
