Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve

Tom and Hester have been travelling the ‘Bird Roads’ for two years after the events of Mortal Engines. But the ship they took from Anna Fang, legendary aviatrix, is drawing unwanted attention in their direction.

Mortal Engines was an extremely fun read, so I was hoping for the same from Predator’s Gold. Reeve ups the ante quite significantly. Locations are more exotic, characters are more realistic and moral implications are far more intellectually stimulating. It’s really very brave to make one of your heroes something of a monster towards the end of the story, and Reeve not only shows a convincing lovers’ tiff, but implies sex in a way obvious enough that it would go over the heads of only the youngest readers, and later pregnancy too. Unfortunately, this increase in maturity doesn’t sit well with his style, and in the end, it only highlights his other shortcomings.

After all, Mortal Engines was fun because it was a very old-fashioned adventure story, essentially a pirate story with a sci-fi twist, plus a twee British flavour and lots of silliness. You could accept the inconsistencies and weaker plot elements because it was all just a bit of fun. When Reeve tries to make it all more serious, you suddenly start questioning the logistics of fuelling the motion of a city over ice and feeding its inhabitants. You start asking how these characters know about various things they almost certainly have never seen, and why they’re all so very British despite there being no reason for them to be. Getting annoyed by big plot tangents that never really go anywhere (and Reeve supplies only a very feeble ending, leaving a LOT open for the third book). Asking yourself why so much ostensibly serious angst hinges on such a silly premise. It just didn’t have the charm that made the first book so accessible, and for that, it suffered.

There are rather too many plot strands. The first book was very simple: Tom gets thrown off his city, makes his way back (with a few self-contained adventures en route), discovers a conspiracy and has a showdown. There’s a subplot with another protagonist, but it’s more to fill in the blanks in Tom’s adventure than much of a story in its own right. Here, though, you get the story of Anchorage, a city searching for the fertile land rumoured to exist in America under the guidance of a spoilt Margravine (don’t you need a Margrave for a Margravine? Oh well, it’s the future; things change), whose character developments are abrupt to say the least. Then there’s the story of the Green Storm trying to bring back their deified leader from the dead. Then there’s the Lost Boys (essentially Fagin’s gang), who are looting Anchorage but really want to attack the Green Storm. Then there’s Tom and Hester’s love story. And then the story of Arkangel coming to chase Anchorage. Yes, they’re all linked somehow, but the story lurches between these stories, leaving the rest dangling until you don’t really care about the leftover parts any more, but still feel vaguely dissatisfied. I think I would have cut the whole Lost Boys story. I liked Caul, but he never had enough time to develop as a character.

There was a lot of potential here, and it has a lot of good moments. However, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel Reeve quite rose up to his own challenge. A shame.