Excessive Candour
Silence Is Golden

If there is one thing that Philip Reeve made utterly clear way back at the beginning of the series that climaxes so thoroughly in A Darkling Plain, it is that he knows how to kill people. The death count in Mortal Engines [2001] is in fact so high that, on first reading this superb tale, it looked as though he might have emptied his quiver; that there was little more to tell, and hardly anybody left to tell it. But Predator's Gold [2003], which is its immediate sequel, and Infernal Devices [2005], which segues directly into A Darkling Plain, told us otherwise. Reeve's frequent terminations of characters—some of them important—do not cut his tale short; they fertilize it.

They also keep us alert, almost painfully so. The Traction City sequence (to give it a name) may have been written and marketed for a Young Adult audience, and the quartet as a whole may retain some debilitating signs of the marketing shibboleths that shape books written for that audience, but the constant perilousness of the Traction world adds a hard poignant edge to all the tropes of growing up that Reeve necessarily honors. What we should all know, but do not often find said, is that growing up in interesting times is a dangerous enterprise. The Traction world—riven by wars and betrayals and wrong turnings, by the constant wholesale destruction of homesteads and home cities and homelands—is no place for normal life.

When a child is abandoned here, he will almost certainly remain abandoned until the last page of the last volume (this happens); when Wren—daughter of Tom and Hester, two of the rare survivors of the first two volumes of Traction—is abducted into slavery partway through Infernal Devices, we do not really expect to see the nuclear family reassembled with hugs and hot grog in A Darkling Plain (and we are plumb right). Tom, with his afflicted heart and fearful sugary blood, does not turn into Tom Cruise in order to rescue Wren from ogres; Hester, whose savage joy in killing never abates, does not don a motherly apron and bake bread for the returning paterfamilias.

(Much of this human story is muffled by the fact that—although the sequence is hugely violent, with decapitations and tortures and strangulations and atrocities and cruelties and deaths deaths deaths galore—because it is marketed for an audience that includes many Christians, there is not a body part in sight, male or female. Death and mutilation are fine; a nipple or a genital would spook these people. So the gritty, real-life family romance of Tom and Hester and Wren is told through veils of unction. The miracle is that Reeve manages, all the same, to make us believe his folk are real.)

Hallucinatory Darwinism

The Traction City books are set in a moderately distant future, millennia after the Sixty Minute War has ended 21st-century civilization, though fragments of culture and artifact have survived, enough orts to inspire the construction of the traction cities, great armored edifices on vast wheels (the great city of London leaves an enormous spoor: vast troughs a hundred feet wide cut by its 100-feet wide wheels, micro-climates where scavengers lurk). Reeve describes these cities with a fresh-paint, steampunk vividness so polished and rendered that their inherent implausibility as artifacts or edifices never seriously enters the mind. His cities are far more densely real than the Okie world-ships in James Blish's Cities in Flight (gathered together 1970), and their progress across the devastated plains and valleys of the planet turns the earth far more pungently than does the pilgrim city in Christopher Priest's Inverted World [1974]. They stink and glisten; they are as intricate as any edifice in a fantasy; people live there.

This hallucinated intensity of depiction comes in part from Reeve's quite extraordinary ability to render in words his powerfully visual imagination (he began as an illustrator). But the suspension of disbelief is sustained as well by one great idea, the concept of Muncipal Darwinism, which shapes the entire sequence. Just like the Social Darwinism which justified the entrepreneurial savageries of late 19th century Britain and America, Municipal Darwinism ("It's a city-eat-city world") rationalizes the behavior of cities over time and through space. As we've followed the sequence, we have all had great fun with this steampunk parody of 19th-century thought (it's an idea which irrestibly tickles the mind) and with Reeve's increasingly explicit portrayals of cities as animals (as predators with gaping teeth, furtive scavengers, hapless cattle and so on).

But there's a catch. Basically, what cities do is eat each other. No new city is born in all of Reeve's four long volumes. The inhabitants of his world get Charles Darwin as wrong as Herbert Spencer did. What Darwin actually said was that, as far as the science of evolution is concerned, true success for an individual did not consist in killing others but in having children. In the end, Municipal Darwinism is only about killing, and adherence to its precepts once again—in this ultimately very serious Young Adult world—threatens to kill the planet. It happened once, Reeve tells us, in the 21st century; it could happen again, the moving cities could gut the planet once again.

Unfortunately, much of the actual telling of Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain suffers from Reeve's apparent addiction to the brightly coloured cliffhangers and melodramatic reversals that many British writers absorbed like mother's milk from the boys' stories of their very early youth, and which they seem to find as difficult to give up as smoking. Once in a while, it may be fun to watch characters hang by their fingernails to the end of a chapter, waiting for rescue (if indeed Reeve doesn't just kill them outright, which he is prone to); but A Darkling Plain, a very long book, has 54 chapters, each one of them likely to culminate in a Peril of Pauline.

A roller coaster born of boys' books

But this braggadocio cannot always distract us from the hard bracing sad real story the sequence tells, which can be broken into three aspects. We have already mentioned the catastrophe of Muncipal Darwinism; images of pollution and of the squandering of resource intensify throughout A Darkling Plain. At the very end, a Stalker—a cyborg created around a dead human body which has been "Resurrected" for this purpose—makes it absolutely clear:

"... humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys which the good earth cannot support. All human civilizations fall, Tom, and all for the same reason; humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever.

This may sound very much like Dr Totenkampf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow [2004], a film which essentializes the boys' fictions of yesterday, but what is interesting here is that—both in the movie and in Reeve—anti-human "blasphemies" abhorrent to any honest lad are uttered without contradiction. The legacy future of Sky Captain is clearly a no-go, and the quite astonishingly beautiful epilogue to A Darkling Plain makes it absolutely explicit that the Stalker is more or less on target, because the human society that succeeds the Traction Cities world is a pastoral counterfactual to that world, powered by utterly benign MagLev discs. It is not an answer to the Stalker cyborg; it is a dream.

The second aspect of story that the rataplan of boy stuff hides is a pretty interesting macro-conflict between the Traction Cities and the eastern and African lands where the cities have not penetrated, and which are dominated by the Green Storm, a Red Guard of totalitarian ecologists who treat those parts of the world under their sway as Colonel Pot treated Cambodia. It is a pretty grotesque caricature of environmentalism, but perhaps Reeve felt he needed a shorthand to damn the opposition, as the long tale was clearly designed from the first to end with the morally justified collapse of both sides. It is only after the collapse that the MagLev-fueled utopia is founded by a floating townlet which has escaped (it is, one suppposes, a symbolic birth, a gesture to genuine Darwinism) the ruins of London. In any case, the conflict between the statics and the predators generates some hugely pyrotechnica battles. Good stuff for boys.

The third story told inside the clatter is that of Tom and Hester, who separate in Infernal Devices partly because Tom is profoundly wounded by Hester's love of killing, and of their search for their daughter Wren, who runs away from home, who is abducted and enslaved, and who escapes, and who slowly discovers in A Darkling Plain that she has fallen in love with young Theo Ngoni, and all ends happily for them—but only after Reeve has put us through several resolution-delaying rigmaroles of pulp plotting, all of which are laid down to idiot-protagonist boobs on Theo's part. In one particularly embarrassing example, Reeve has the poor lad jump out of an escaping aircraft to retrieve a letter which he has already memorized, therefore missing the ship and any chance he has of finding Wren for many many pages, which prolongs the book for exactly that many pages. This sort of thing is a cheap trick to play on a character, one who—except when Reeve needs him to goose the pulp—is conceived as an intelligent and attractive young man. All the same, as we said, Theo and Wren do come together in the end. Tom and Hester also reunite, though their union (very maturely told) is terminal. Nor do they ever ever see Wren again, except through the remote vision screens of an orbiting superweapon.

The use—or not-use—of that weapon closes the long tale. It has been a roller coaster, a pain in the ass, a profoundly satisfying visual feast, a cacophony of shticks, a wealth of story out of which something like wisdom is distilled. Whenever Reeve shuts his pump down for a page, as he does in his final pages, the wisdom of the tale fills the well of being. After much noise, utter silence: The last pages of The Darkling Plain are as quiet as truth.