Mortal Engines is full of characters whose external appearances hide their inner nature. The most noteworthy example of this is Hester Shaw, who has a massive scar on her face and is missing an eye. Because she is not traditionally beautiful, some characters assume that she is evil, as Tom does when he first sees her. He instinctively tries to stop Hester from attacking Thaddeus Valentine, who has a dashing appearance and a high reputation in London. As it turns out, however, Hester is correct about Valentine: he is a murderer who personally killed Hester’s family and is willing to help kill many more with the super-weapon MEDUSA. Despite only having one eye, Hester can see people’s true natures better than Tom can, and despite not looking like a princess, she is nevertheless the hero of the story.
Over the course of the story, Tom has to confront many of the other prejudices that he picked up from living in London. At the beginning, he believes that London is a splendid mechanical marvel, but when he finally sees his city from the outside, he realizes that it’s ugly and not so different from any other city. Similarly, he believes at the beginning that the people from the Anti-Traction League, who live on the other side of the shield wall, are backwards and uncivilized. But when he sees the settlement of Batmunkh Gompa up close and gets to meet Anti-Tractionists like Miss Fang and Captain Khora, he realizes that they’re people too and that, in fact, their opposition to London seems to be justified. Mortal Engines explores how first impressions can be misleading, but it also explores how exposure to new people and places can help a person overcome initial prejudices and see beyond superficial appearances.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Prejudice and First Impressions ThemeTracker
Prejudice and First Impressions Quotes in Mortal Engines
Thaddeus Valentine was Tom’s hero: a former scavenger who had risen to become London’s most famous archaeologist—and also its Head Historian, much to the envy and disgust of people like Pomeroy. Tom kept a picture of him tacked to the dormitory wall above his bunk, and he had read his books, Adventures of a Practical Historian and America Deserta—Across the Dead Continent with Gun, Camera and Airship, until he knew them by heart.
“Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”
“The law!” she scoffed. “Valentine is the law in London. Isn’t he the Lord Mayor’s favourite? Isn’t he the Head Historian? No, he’ll kill me unless I kill him first.”
Magnus Crome had been ruler of London for nearly twenty years, but he still didn’t look like a Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayors in Katherine’s history books were chubby, merry, red-faced men, but Crome was as thin as an old crow, and twice as gloomy.
“Yes, I know, and I’m terribly sorry about it, but what can I do?” said Wreyland sadly. “Times are hard, you know.”
“It’s made of junk!” he gasped.
“Junk?” laughed Miss Fang. “Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aero-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon... It’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards...”
“What does she mean, K Division?” asked Katherine.
“I want Tunbridge Wheels to turn into a city, a proper big city wiv me as Lord Mayor, sumfink I can ‘and down to me sprogs. And you Tommy, I want you to tell me how a city ought to be, and teach me manners. Ettyket, like. So I can hob nob wiv’ other Lord Mayors and not ‘ave them laugh at me behind my back.”
“No!” Katherine heard herself say. “Oh, no, no, no!” She started to run across the garden, staring towards the lightning-flecked cloud which wreathed the wreckage of the conurbation. From Circle Park and all the observation platforms came the sound of wordless voices, and she thought at first that they were crying out in horror, the way she wanted to—but no; they were cheering, cheering, cheering.
“I may be no better than Valentine,” she went on, “but there is a difference between us. Valentine tried to kill you, and I want to keep you alive. So, will you come with me?”
“I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”
And light burst down from above; the harsh beam of an airship’s searchlight raking across the snow. The aviatrix reeled blindly backwards, and Valentine leaped up, snatching his sword, pulling her hard against him as he drove it home. For a moment the two of them stumbled together like drunken dancers at the end of a party, close enough to Tom’s hiding place for him to see the bright blade push out through the back of Miss Fang’s neck and hear her desperate, choking whisper: “Hester Shaw will find you. She will find you and—”
She had come to think of Bevis Pod as a sweet, clumsy, rather useless person, someone who needed her to look after him, and she suspected that that was how the Historians all thought of him as well. But that afternoon she had begun to understand that he was really much cleverer than her.
“I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom,” she said. “Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me.”
“I’ll circle back...”
“I’ll be dead.”
“I’ll circle back anyway...”
Hester was stumbling backwards, lifting her bound hands to ward off Father’s blow, and Katherine flung herself between them so that suddenly it was she who was in his path, and his sword slid easily through her and she felt the hilt jar hard against her ribs.
He gently moves a stray strand which has blown into her mouth, and holds her close, and waits—and the storm-light breaks over them and they are a knot of fire, a rush of blazing gas, and gone: the shadows of their bones scattering into the brilliant sky.
“But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”
