Mortal Engines, the first part of a quartet by Philip Reeve, is a children’s book set in a dystopian future, after “the sixty minute war” has destroyed the surface of the Earth, where Municipal Darwinism is seen as the only way of life, and traction towns, cities built to move across the wasteland of what was once Europe, hunt each other down and devour each other for resources.

The narrative is split into two, with Tom Natsworthy, an Apprentice Historian, and Hester Shaw, a terribly scarred girl who attempts to kill Tom’s hero, head Historian Thaddeus Valentine, featuring in one strand, and Katherine Valentine, Thaddeus Valentine’s daughter, featuring in the other. What is so wonderful about the narrative, though, is how these two narratives weave around each other, before finally coming together into one explosive denoument. What is even more wonderful is how the characters are so beautifully drawn and developed as both Katherine and Tom, especially, discover that Valentine, and London itself, are nowhere near as perfect as they imagine.

It is, of course, very easy to dismiss Mortal Engines as “only” a children’s book (a phrase that, given my choice of course, really grates on me), but there is no sense of Philip Reeve talking down to his readers, and there is no intrepid, flawless hero character to save the day; at one point Tom, realistically, actually wets his pants when first faced with a Stalker (a cyborg created from the corpse of a soldier), which is something I’ve never come across in a book for children before, as far as I can remember. In fact, I have to say, there is no flawless character in the book; what marks the “good” from the “bad” is merely the damage that each flaw leads to, in the world at large. There is no simplistic moral code in this book.

Further, the book has a lot to say, though not in a particularly didactic manner, about the inability of people to learn from the mistakes of the past, no matter how bad those mistakes were; a subject that is particularly potent, considering the books environmental and post-war themes. Even considering the terrible effects that war and pollution have caused, there are still many characters in the book who are willing to start the whole thing off once more.

If I have made the book sound terribly depressing, however, that is far from the truth; there are many instances of genuine humour in Mortal Engines, and it is a testament to Reeve’s skill as a writer that he often juxtaposes these moments with some of the darkest moments in the story. He also highlights the ability of just a few people to genuinely make a difference in the world.

Overall, then, I loved, this book, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of the quartet, not because I don’t think that they will be wonderfully written (because I do) but because, having sneakily looked at the blurbs for the other three books, I don’t think that they can match up to Mortal Engines for me, and, besides, I’ve got my own ideas about what I would like to happen to my favourite characters, and I’m sticking to them, but Mortal Engines still works as a stand-alone book.

Reeve has also written another series, so far a trilogy, set in an alternative Victorian Era that involves space travel, and begins with Larklight, and, if it is written in the same wonderful style as Mortal Engines, looks to be fantastic.