Book review: The Last Days Of New Paris

Picador, £14.99

Review by Sean Bell

THANKFULLY, self-discipline is among China Miéville’s abundant talents. Though his imagination is a grand hothouse, verdant enough that his books almost occupy their own phantasmagorical sub-genre, he rarely uses it as an excuse for indulgence. His plots may sprawl, but they do not lose focus; his imagery might be dense and florid, but it's never pretentious; his views on politics and literary theory are well known and ardently held, but only occasionally do they leave his work feeling heavy-handed or academic.

Perhaps most crucially, Miéville knows how to wear his influences on his sleeve, with humility and respect, while at the same time avoiding the derivative. When one finds echoes of HP Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock or JG Ballard in his writing, he never lurks in the shadows of his inspirations, offering stale imitations or soft retreads; his goals are always greater than simply emulating what has come before. In that regard, The Last Days Of New Paris may be Miéville’s most appropriate work of fiction yet, so keenly aware of the artistic continuum in which it exists, it utilises it as both setting and plot device.

It is 1950, yet war still rages in France. In the capital, Thibaut, a young resistance fighter allied to a guerilla cell of the Surrealist movement, embarks upon a violent, hallucinatory journey through a city that now horribly mirrors his own artistic philosophy. “Manifs” – works of Surrealist art brought to impossible life – prowl the ruined streets. The Nazis have sealed off the city, in hope of containing that which refuses to be understood, while seeking to retaliate with their own supernatural abominations. Interspersed with this is a secondary narrative, set in 1941, which details the cabal of Surrealists and occultists whose desperate, idealistic amalgamation of art and magic inadvertently brought New Paris into being.

Following an encounter with a pack of slavering wolf-tables, Thibaut allies himself with Sam, an American photographer whose fascination with the Manifs – “I’m not leaving until I catch them all” – has a touch of Pokemon to it, and an “exquisite corpse”, a Manif born from a collective drawing by André Breton, Yves Tanguy and Jacqueline Lamba. Together, the trio endeavour to save this strange demi-monde from an even more nightmarish fate.

Miéville takes one of the most exhausted tropes of alternate history – a counterfactual Second World War – and breathes joyously vivid life into it. With relish and thoughtful deliberation, he juxtaposes the intentional irrationality of Surrealism with the uglier, bloodier irrationality of warfare. In comparison with his other works, Miéville’s prose here is at its most restrained, almost terse, yet the torrent of imagery, gorgeous and horrific, is almost unceasing, and never less than lambently evocative.

Predictably, the novella functions as a meditation on what Surrealism sought to achieve, and how those goals might change if the real and the surreal were to suddenly become one. Mournfully considering the warped, ravaged beauty of New Paris, along with the loss of the old, Thibaut wonders: “Do I even deserve these places any more? They came at the wrong time and they came in the wrong way. Liberation was f***ed up.”

The book’s few shortcomings are arguably only evident in the context of Miéville’s own bibliography. In the Manifs, his devotees might be reminded of the Remade from his "Bas-Lag" novels, and those who remember the entrancing romance and byzantine storytelling of Perdido Street Station will find Thibaut and Sam’s story compelling, but less memorable by comparison. Also, the forces of Hell – working, naturally, in concert with the Nazis – are almost bland when surrounded by the twisted Wonderland of New Paris, though perhaps that was by design.

Nevertheless, The Last Days Of New Paris not only delivers all the fun its premise suggests, but thrills with the sheer depth of its ambition, invention and historical detail. Miéville may not, as the old slogan went, “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality”. But for 200 pages, he allows us to wonder what would. There could not be a nobler Surrealist enterprise.