Book three of Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles, and the penultimate book of the series. An enjoyable romp, but I fear that the books are getting progressively weaker.
First of all, let me establish that I usually hate it when a series jumps a decade or two and the focus shifts away from the original characters and onto their protégés/children/successors etc, unless it really does feel like the characters’ stories have been told in full. Here, I found it somewhat irksome; the best thing about the last book was the way they developed Hester to be a very dark heroine, taking after her father in her rather psychotic ways. It wasn’t particularly well-done, since it felt a bit artificial, but the dynamic it created made me curious to see what would happen next. Well, what happened next was that Tom and Hester had the child hinted at towards the end of book two and settled down peacefully and raised the child. It was a bit of a stretch to believe that nothing happened until their daughter Wren brings crisis on them all, but the final payoff of this arc does work very well, and sets up the final book excellently.
Hester is really exactly the same character she was in book two. Tom huffs and puffs a bit more, but is essentially the same. The trouble with making them older is that then the teenaged character, Wren, starts to be etched in rather condescending lines: she’s fifteen, but innocent as a 10-year-old, wanting to have ‘adventures’ as though she’s in a Famous Five novel.
Where Reeve dealt with teenaged love very well in previous books, here it seems tacked-on and glib, and Wren’s ‘I don’t want adventures any more!’ reaction soon into the book makes her character very hard to take seriously. To this is added the problem that Reeve’s sense of humour has got very old by now. Yes, it’s all terribly twee in a whimsical British way, with principle locations being Brighton and Grimsby and all sorts of silly pop culture references, and most of the characters being bumblingly middle-classed. For the first time in the series, black characters seemed token, and the amount of times poetic references were spoilt by the fact that no-one could possibly know about the things referred to in this sci-fi world had doubled (though many were the omniscient narrator’s, thus acceptable).
The real problem, however, is the plot. The Lost Boys come back to Anchorage, now Anchorage-in-Vineland, after an artefact they saw on their last visit, The Tin Book. Wren, thirsty for adventure, takes it to them, but Hester’s fury leads to most of the Lost Boys ending up dead, and Wren being kidnapped. Wren ends up in Brighton, Tom and Hester search for her in Grimsby, and at the same time, the Green Storm hear that the Tin Book really exists and come for it.
The Tin Book is the ultimate McGuffin. No-one but Anna Fang know what it’s for, so try to get hold of it for spurious reasons such as its value to collectors, and while it will most likely figure into the next book (though not in any way that couldn’t have been introduced by myriad other sources), it was totally useless here except as a plot device. Yup, McGuffin epitomised.
That would be okay, except that it means that really, none of the characters’ movements have much real point in the story at all. The central plots are Tom and Hester rescuing Wren (which takes about two minutes, after much procrastination), Wren trying to get back the Tin Book (again, with much padding), and Oenone Zero trying to bring down The Stalker Fang, which happens regardless of the intervention of any of the main characters. It just feels like several disparate things having nothing to do with each other happening at once, with a lot of contrivance and convenient coincidence tying it all together. There was never really anything driving the plot: it never seemed Wren was in any real danger, since the focus was on her being a proactive teen heroine, there was no real reason to care about the Tin Book and ultimately Wren’s actions had no significance to the conclusion, and Oenone Zero’s plot was obvious from the start, and nothing ever got in its way. Thus, there was no real sense of tension or satisfaction.
But the journey itself, the moment-to-moment retelling of events, was full of excitement and the climax, while open-ended, was spectacular and thrilling. Reeve is excellent at adventure writing and grand gestures. His characters are flimsy and his plots are contrived, but perhaps that helps establish the adventurous mood.
Unsatisfying, but good fun nonetheless.
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