It seems to happen to every author who writes adventure stories for young adults; what begins as a silly, frivolous series written with tongue firmly in cheek becomes, with the addition of the catalyst known as ‘success’, something very self-important, epic and serious. This can result in some real trainwrecks of misguided overambitious last novels, but Philip Reeve just barely manages to escape this pitfall.
This bloated novel, almost as fat as a Harry Potter doorstop, is that last of Philip Reeves’ charming Hungry City Chronicles, and despite its scale remains frivolous enough to avoid looking like self-parody. The Stalker Fang is still alive, and now she has the codes to awaken the orbital superweapon ODIN. Meanwhile, there are signs of life in the old wreck of London, Tom Natsworthy’s old town. He and his daughter Wren want to go and see if there might have been survivors, but for that, they will have to enter into Green Storm territory, where despite a truce, the inhabitants of moving cities are not welcome.
With three books’ worth of backstory, this is certainly not for the uninitiated, but there’s much to recommend the previous stories, and I feel it’s quite a shame Reeve isn’t getting more attention than he already is. His daft wit, extremely well-realised but also totally bizarre future setting, his love of classic boys’ adventure storytelling and his talent for occasionally spicing a descriptive passage with a metaphor that he beautifully extends that little bit further than expected are all admirable, and you’ll find few books more fun than this one, or more evocative and cinematic in the telling.
The major flaw of the book, however, is its mess of a plot. Reeve uses the classic weak storyline approach of having half a dozen different plotlines overlapping at the same time, with far too many characters becoming the focus of attention for just a few pages before disappearing again while the others have their turns. The action is kept fast-paced by this constant switching, but without much to really capture the interest in any of them, it all starts to get a bit dull, and the characters become more expositional vehicles than people in their own rights. Some bad decisions also lead to characters like Fishcake who begin in very interesting situations and have some of the book’s best emotional development barely appearing, while Theo, who was just totally flat and uninteresting and seems to have been included mostly because Reeve was fetishising the idea of having a mixed-race romantic couple in his books, spends chapters and chapters getting into irrelevant scrapes and ultimately being of no consequence whatsoever. The climax of the action is anything but climactic, and everything seems to fizzle out as Reeve realises he’s gone on for over 50 chapters. Some secondary characters get killed off for no reason but to look heroic, characters who should have strong bonds barely seem to think about one another, comic relief characters get far more attention in far more contrived ways than I would have expected from Reeve, who genuinely did surprise me in some of the previous books, and only a highly cheesy but also extremely beautiful final passage saves the whole ending from being a sad implosion of bathos.
But that final passage really did lift my spirits, and reminded me of the deeper undercurrents of thought running through the series beneath the adrenaline rush. A highly enjoyable YA sci-fi series, quintessentially British and always a lot of fun. My gripes about characters making metaphors with knowledge they almost certainly wouldn’t have, cultural homogeny, silly names and a degree of smugness remain, but they’re outweighed by the sheer sugar-rush of exuberance the books unleash.
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