#reeve_thoughts

[fandomsandhappiness]

the stalker fang is both a shrine to anna and her most devout worshipper

[fandomsandhappiness]

not to add a whole essay to your otherwise excellent post or anything but this was a bit much for the tags. i reread predator's gold recently and although i never liked the love triangle thing it was actually a lot better than i remembered. once you look at it thematically it all starts clicking into place

predator's gold begins with tom (despite all he's seen in the last book) still defending the ideology of municipal darwinism, even when it gets him into trouble. he can't go back to london, and wouldn't if he could, but that's not to say he doesn't miss the city and his time in the museum (which is a major factor behind his decision to seek out its ruins in book four)

in the previous book hester was paralleled with katherine. tom fixated on katherine because she was his ideal adventure heroine, being beautiful and valentine's daughter, and then he got stuck with hester instead, who was very much not beautiful but was—as it turned out—valentine's daughter also. tom was constantly comparing hester to katherine, and hester constantly came up short in his estimation. but in predator's gold, tom's love interests are hester and freya—who, like katherine, starts to take on all these additional qualities in his mind

for tom, freya symbolises a return to city life, and in a way to his own comfortable life before he left london (which i think he idealises slightly, but that's tom for you). tom isn't just interested in her but also in what a relationship with her would offer him. whereas hester represents moving forward into the unknown, a life on the bird roads. (ironically, freya's big goal is to set her whole city chasing an even bigger unknown, but i suspect tom sees that as a suitably historian-y adventure that could be enjoyed with a set of sturdy deckplates under him)

but where it gets REALLY interesting is that sathya and caul are in the same position. do they move on? or do they refuse to let go of the past?

with sathya, obviously, this plays out with anna fang. she works very hard to resurrect her, pins all her hopes on her, and refuses to listen to the stalker when she insists that she's not anna. so she loses a hand

caul's situation is easily the harshest of the three. the abusive nature of his upbringing was calculated to instil him with both a fear and a love of uncle. letting go is much harder for him than it is for the other two. but in the end, he turns his back on uncle and the lost boys. of the three, he gets the happiest ending (in predator's gold. later books have their ups and downs)

tom, of course, kisses freya, and sets in motion a chain of events that end in him getting shot. idiot (affectionate)

so on the whole, i'm a lot more tolerant of the love triangle than i once was

I never re-read predator's gold because I don't like the teenage drama but I'm doing it now and it's worth it for hester being the character of all time

[fandomsandhappiness]

she is BALD

she is BISEXUAL

she is AUTISTIC

i didn't say a name but she popped into your head, didn't she?

[fandomsandhappiness]

say what you like about that old man, you can't deny he had vision

[fandomsandhappiness]

don't get me wrong i love hester/tom as much as the next mortal engines fan but i think any reasonable modern day au is required to have hester and freya in lesbians together starring tom as their dog with an anxiety disorder

[fandomsandhappiness]

Shrike, Gilgamesh, and the golem

“What are you for?” asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Shrike looked down at him. He pondered a while, thinking of something Dr Popjoy had told Anna. “I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE,” he said. (ADP.532-533)

The machine is shaped and wrought to purpose, but Shrike’s determination of his own reason for being is very much a recurring theme throughout the quartet. Perhaps this is why his self-identification as such caught my eye. He has shucked off all other purpose but to remember, which he proceeds to do by telling a story that begins with the opening lines of Mortal Engines. He assumes the role of a framing device—another sort of remembering machine, perhaps?

Dredged out of the past and put to new purpose—rather like Shrike himself—this technique has been used before. I am thinking of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the eponymous hero gives up a life of adventuring, accepts the inevitability of his own death and, as I read it, goes on to write the tablets that almost make up the text. I don’t think it's a one-to-one equivalence in either case: neither Shrike nor Gilgamesh would tell the stories quite as we read them, but I think the texts can be read as echoes of the stories they claim have been told.

According to the text of Gilgamesh, the story can be found in the city of Uruk, written on lapis tablets, but the tablets on which this is written—the tablets we have today—are made of clay. What role does the tablet play for Gilgamesh? A framing device? A remembering machine?

Memory, history, archaeology; all these are central concerns of the quartet, driven home frequently by Tom Natsworthy, the would-be historian, and his fictionalising counterparts Valentine and Pennyroyal, each of whom attain a level of renown that Tom never does. Much of the series’ humour derives from pieces of more-or-less contemporary culture filtered through hundreds or thousands of years of post-apocalyptic life. What is the truth? What is history?

“For a somewhat sensationalized but passably accurate account of London’s momentous push east in 1007, see Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.” So says The Traction Codex, listing Reeve’s work alongside those of Nimrod Pennyroyal (Predator’s Gold) and Sathya Kuranath (A True History of the Wind Flower, “generally regarded as unreliable”). The Codex formed the basis for The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, for which this particular line was removed. Like the multiple recreations and translations of Gilgamesh, and the conflicting accounts of various histories given by different parties in the quartet and the prequel trilogy, the past is not straightforward. From Janis Dawson: “Reeve’s novels are an eclectic, sometimes bizarre, blend of genres and forms punctuated with scores of parodic references to classic texts, histories, popular literature, film, and advertising blurbs. They are, in effect, literary Jenny Hanivers”. (p. 143)

Clay constitutes the tablets of the Gilgamesh epic, but within the text, it is from clay that the goddess Aruru forms the wild man, Enkidu. Rival, companion, perhaps lover to Gilgamesh, Enkidu is a formidable warrior and loyal friend. The body of the wild man and the material on which the text survives; clay is the substrate of life and words. A parallel can be found in Jewish folklore: formed from clay, the golem was brought to life by writing one of the names of God on a piece of paper, which would be placed in the mouth or forehead. In various tales, the golem is both protector and threat. Terry Pratchett plays with this idea in Feet of Clay: the words in our head make us who we are. We are the material upon which history is written.

Perhaps fittingly, no one conclusion jumps out at me. The histories we create, or remember, make us who we are? There is no escaping the past? What we choose to believe, about ourselves or about history, matters? Shrike is a futuristic take on the golem? The remembering machine, whether clay (juncture of life/writing and earth) or cyborg (juncture of human/data and machine), is a letter sent forward into the future, as deadly and implacable a technology as any Slow Bomb?

Variously, Mortal Engines is claimed as a 2001 fictional children's novel, as Shrike’s remembering, as Philip Reeve’s sensationalized but passably accurate account of events... Perhaps it is necessary for these histories to co-exist with each, not in spite of but because of their differences.

Note: The Traction Codex doesn’t have page numbers, but it’s ebook only, so it should be easy enough to track down any quotes. For Gilgamesh I’m referring to Benjamin Foster’s translation (Second Norton Critical Edition), and for golems I’m relying on Wikipedia. Let me know if you want a copy of the Dawson article, though I think the line I quoted is the only bit worth reading.