The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

China Miéville’s novels, founding documents of a recent literary genre dubbed the New Weird, stir fantasy, horror, crime, science fiction, and speculative history into mind-blowing imbibements of boundless make-believe. They are weird in setting and circumstance, but spring so solidly from historic, geographic, and architectural fact that their imagined worlds seem emblematic of our own.

Miéville’s latest tale is a speculative lesson in art history that brings the strange creations of the Surrealist movement to life. The Last Days of New Paris, written as a book-inside-a-book, is an imagined document of an alternative history unleashed by Surrealist radicals during World War II. The story cycles between actual 1941 and an alternate 1950, where Thibaut, a fighter for the Resistance, continues to battle the German occupiers in a few central arrondissements that seem to have suffered the apocalypse. The ruined streets are crawling with demons sprung from hell and a host of impossible creatures the Resistance calls manifs. These walking, wheeling, and flapping creatures have leaped from the easels and sketch pads of André Breton, Max Ernst, and others. They come to life after an explosion known as the “S-Blast” — a release of energy generated by the creation of Surrealist art. The blast is set off at Les Deux Magots, the celebrated Parisian café that was ground zero for both Surrealists and existentialists. Surrealism is suddenly alive everywhere. Sidewalks are lined with flowers whose petals burst from the mouths of snakes. The top half of the Eiffel Tower, minus its bottom half, floats in the sky. At dawn, a great shark mouth appears on the horizon “smiling like a stupid angel” and chews silently on the sky.

Some of the off-kilter beings are the products of a Surrealist game in which different artists, unaware of what the other artists sketched, linked various unpredictable mechanical and organic parts into absurdist drawings. One of these collaborations, Breton’s Exquisite Corpse (also the name of the Surrealists’ game), drawn with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy in 1938, is reproduced in all its tinted, tilted glory on page two of Miéville’s book. It’s an unlikely stack of pants, a vise, and other machine-shop devices, including a beard harboring a locomotive, topped by an expressionless face under a crown that resembles a swollen pupa covered with a leaf. The illustration of this odd creature — being able to see it — is the novel’s link to reality. Like a stray dog, the absurd being come-to-life becomes dumbly devoted to Thibaut, who has had a strange relation to the manifs since the age of fifteen, when an “impossible composite of tower and human” with three legs, two of them in high heels, and a face made of a grate, looked him in the eyes and spared him the crushing fate it dealt to the Nazis who murdered his family. Thibaut is joined by photographer and Resistance informer Sam, a woman who is intent on capturing the madness of the fantastical war zone they inhabit. Her documents are set to appear in a book with the same title as Miéville’s. The result, minus the photos but complete with Thibaut’s illustrations of a few manifs, crude reproductions of actual works of art, seems to be the book we’re reading. There’s an afterword explaining that the 1950 narrative came from the author’s 2012 interview with a reclusive, elderly figure who can only be Thibaut. The text is also appended with “Notes: Some Manifs, Details, and Their Sources” that connects actual Surrealists and their antics to the hallucinatory story of New Paris, giving it a certain air of scholarship, both real and imagined, of the sort found in Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings.

Despite its complicated back story, The Last Days of New Paris has a straightforward plot. Thibaut and Sam, fearing that the Nazis are attempting to evolve manifs to do their dirty work, set out to find the source of the S-Blast and restore old Paris. There are also hints that some final overwhelming manifestation known as “Fall Rot” is about to be loosed (Fall Rot is the historical name given to the Germans’ follow-up strategy for capturing the whole of France). Thibaut and Sam have a run-in with beasts that are half-wolf, half-wooden table (they later eat one, using the legs for the fire to roast its neck meat). Thibaut witnesses Germans trying to stop a woman riding a relentless half-woman, half-cycle manifestation known as “the Vélo,” a creation taken from a penand-ink work done by Leonora Carrington, a painter and novelist once attached to Ernst. Miéville has written of divided neighborhoods (The

City & the City) and artifacts come to life (Kraken) before. His style here is more abbreviated, often delivered in short phrases and notes, and is as much about the unexpected consequences of “living art” as it is about art’s role and response to its times. Much of the horror here is comic, done by creatures who are both super-powered and clumsy, wandering a world where the power of imagination, without regard to good and evil, is asserted. Heavy stuff, yes, but The Last Days of New Paris, deep thoughts aside (“Can living artwork die?” Thibaut wonders as he prepares to find out), is also a lot of fun, right down to the cartoonish-looking watercolorist who paints everything over to look just fine. Bet you can’t guess who that is. — Bill Kohlhaase

China Miéville appears at the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.) as part of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings & Conversations series at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 18. Tickets, $3 and $6, can be purchased by calling 505-988-1234 or through www.ticketssantafe.org.