Cover: Paddy Donnelly
‘The sea . . . was full of tastes and flavours. . . It was like a tapestry of many coloured threads, and every thread was a current that led to another cove, or another deep, or another island, or another time.’ (p 260)
Traction record
Philip Reeve is one of the very finest contemporary writers of fantasy for MG/YA. However, his novels are not the typical warriors/mages/dragons kind of fantasy. They do not involve heroic quests to fulfil rhyming prophecies, nor do they feature such currently rather over-used tropes as academies of magic, mortal combat trials or romantically-inclined vampires. Rather it is the remarkably rich originality of Philip Reeve’s imagined worlds that makes his books so special.
He is also a very versatile writer. Aside from many entertaining books for younger readers (often working with Sarah McIntyre), he has already created several towering, but completely distinctive, masterpieces of speculative fiction for MG/YA. The Mortal Engines sequence is a highly regarded triumph, and rightly so.* It is sometimes described as ‘steam punk’, but its hugely inventive ‘traction cities’, and the thrilling adventures built around them, also involve richly drawn characters and highly involving human drama. The later-written prequel trilogy, Fever Crumb, is far too good to live in the shadows of its better-known predecessor. Finally, this world was topped up with an enjoyable collection of short stories in Night Flights and some quite superb additional illustrations in The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines.
However, for me, the best of the best of his previous work is the Railhead trilogy. This startlingly imagined world, centring around sentient trains, is a mesmerising experience. It is not only the wildest of rides, but has fascinating socio-political and even mystical overtones too.
There are also a couple of splendid stand-alone novels, including the justly acclaimed Here Lies Arthur.
Deep and wild
In 2021 Philip Reeve started a new series with Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep. Perhaps for a slightly younger audience**, it is once again very different in feel from these others. However, it shares with its predecessors both the strength of imagination and the quality of writing that are Philip Reeve hallmarks. Set in the early nineteenth century, a small but rich cast of characters, living on a wild and remote island, act out the conflict between ‘enlightened’ ideas of science and the powerful, elemental ‘magic’ of the sea. The writing is superbly descriptive, strongly evoking landscapes, weathers and moods and the story rapidly builds to a hugely exciting sequence of climaxes.
Last year, a second volume was added, Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild, which takes Utterly to a quite different, but equally thrilling location, the ‘Hunter’s Wood’. The author draws in many aspects of traditional landscape magic, Druid circles, chalk figures and, of course, the Horned Hunter himself. Yet he skilfully works these into his own wildly-imagined world, continuing his themes in a contrasting context. Whilst the first Utterly Dark book is a story of the ocean, this one is largely about the land, and its new elements make it differently the same in just the way a good sequel should be.
Timely
Now this year Philip Reeve adds Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time and this concluding title of the trilogy is the richest and most complex of the three. A thrilling triumph, it lifts the whole story onto another level, into (literally) another dimension, and firmly into the realm of great children’s fantasies.
This book starts where the first did, on the Wildsea island of 1812, and this period is once again skilfully evoked, both through historic references, and particularly in the dialogue, which cleverly establishes speech patterns from this earlier age without them ever sounding artificially quaint. However, early in this compelling narrative, Utterly plunges, with her strange mother the Gorm, into what turns out to be an ocean of time. She is taught that
‘. . . time is not a river. Time is a sea. It has its shallows and its deeps. Its myriad currents lead to every part of it . . . through all the many ages of the world.’ (p 35)
She then follows these currents until she finds herself in the Wildsea of 1971. It comes as a narrative jolt of the most exciting kind and is quite an authorial coup.
Quickly, the narrative splits between several significant characters, interleaving the exploits of each, in the manner of Tolkein after The Breaking of the Fellowship. This storytelling style always makes for page-turning compulsion and here it is extended by the alternation of events in the two different time periods. It makes for amazingly engrossing reading.
Skilful
Again and again the reader’s delight is compounded by Philip Reeves’ quite wonderfully writing. Whilst his words are never florid or obscure, his prose is awash with evocative language, so that characters and locations leap into sensuous life, pulling the reader deeply into different experiences. moods and emotions. Its highs are excitement, tension and jeopardy, its recoveries thoughtfulness, reflection and great human warmth. It is by turns technicolour brilliance and delicate, pastel poignancy.
: . . . it was as if the earth were a Seville orange, and the red hot hands of the sun were squeezing it until its skin split and the bright juices squirted out.’ (p 264)
‘She had lost her lustre, like one of those pebbles that shines with a hundred delicate colours when you find it in a tide pool, but turns dull and grey when you bring it home and set it on the mantelpiece.’ (p 26)
It is breathtaking writing by any standards - and all the more thrilling when the thematic ripples of time and tide sparkle through it.
Deeper yet
However, particularly special is the way the author deals with the concept of time and time travel. He does not fall, as many do, into the illogicality of the ‘time paradox’. Rather, what he presents is far more in tune with recent quantum physics and philosophy. The idea that, in universal terms, all time is present, that our thinking of time as a flowing river is merely a human construct to deal with our own memories, would, I think, resonate with Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time) as well as T S Eliot (The Four Quartets). It is simultaneously scientific and poetic.
Such concepts may well challenge many young readers, but if they open up their thinking, and awaken imagination, then that itself is a most valuable thing.
Magic
On a different, but equally challenging level, the time split story also allows an interesting contrast between an age of (already fading) magic and something closer to our modern scepticism.
‘Utterly, the time you were born into is the last age when magic dared to show itself, and the tide was turning even then. Humans had already begun to grow too clever, and now they have grown cleverer still, and there is no place left for the old things in their world.’ (p 254)
Perhaps it is a loss to be regretted, despite the fact that the Gorm and her sea magic, the Hunter and his land magic, are far from consistently benign.
Elastic
However, this third volume does not only reconcile different time periods on Wildsea. Like Utterly herself, it is of the sea and of the land. As such, it brings the different strands of the whole trilogy together beautifully, thrillingly and indeed most surprisingly too.
The Utterly Dark books provide wonderful entertainment for all and will provoke thoughtful reflection for many. They are not directly about changing our own world for the better, but they will do a great deal to develop children who can do so. Philip Reeve, and other fine writers like him, are elastic for young imaginations; they allow them to stretch. And the world so desperately needs children with expansive imagination. They need to imagine what our world might be - and what it could be.
Now we have three truly wondrous multi-title sequences from the uber-imaginative pen of Philip Reeve*** Will they ever stop coming? I sincerely hope not.
Notes;
* Please don’t judge these books on the back of the 2018 movie. Immerse yourself in their mind-blowing, emotion-tugging writing instead.
**Perhaps 9 yrs upwards. Although readers should always read what they want to read, without the restriction of age (or any other) labels.
*** Four, if you count Fever Crumb as separate from Mortal Engines.