Surrealist art has come to life and the Nazis have unleashed demons
A “weird fiction” book is set in a world in which surrealist art has come to life and the Nazis have unleashed demons.
Is it possible to be professionally strange? Not that China Miéville’s books are merely strange. They’re also erudite, intelligent and alert to their own position on the shifting sands of genre. At his best, Miéville simultaneously embodies the most interesting qualities of weird fiction – his own preferred term for the amalgam of fantasy, horror and science fiction he practises – and comments on them.
If “at his best” strikes you as carefully non-committal, well spotted: I am unable to pretend that this newest slice of Miéville weird delights me. It’s my least favourite of his 13 published books. This is partly to do with an imbalance of scale and scope. Miéville first became famous for his Bas-Lag trilogy, three enormous novels set in an invented world of extravagantly prodigal strangeness: the kind of world that needs an epic-scale story for its wealth of exotic detail to register as a positive, rather than an overwhelming, encumbrance.
The Last Days of
New Paris is towards the other end of the spectrum in terms of brute length, so much so that it’s subtitled “A Novella” – although at 170-odd pages, plus afterword and notes, it stretches the limits of that term. Miéville has written good short stories and very good short novels before now; he is not someone whose imagination can only breathe in vast spaces. But here he’s playing with ideas that seem to need more room than he’s given them.
New Paris: old Paris plus weaponised surrealism, Nazis and demons. It’s 1951, and World War II never ended. Instead, someone or something has released a blast of energy that brings surrealist art to highly dangerous life. The Nazis respond by raising demons. The resistance splinters into warring factions, the hell-beasts rebel and run riot, and the city is placed under blockade. Things get complicated.
Actually, very complicated. The internecine relations of Miéville’s fractured resistance groups will ring true to anyone who knows French history, but verisimilitude is no good reason to impose so much political backstory on a book this short; and the resistance groups are not even the story’s main focus. That would be the history and credo of the surrealist movement. Don’t even ask.
Rampaging giant Dalíesque statues, underdescribed and rendered tiresome to leave room for more freeze-dried aesthetics: this is not the way most bad genre fiction fails. But I wonder whether, even allowed more pages so the philosophy could spread out and not clog the narrative, this particular story is one that could work.
The book is about the attempt to use surrealism, to ride it to victory – in a way, to commodify it. This is also what the book itself is doing by framing surrealist ideas and images within a military-adventure plotline. At first glance, this is typical Miéville cleverness: enacting his own story’s key idea is just his flavour of meta. But surrealism in harness quickly corrodes into kitsch. As strange as this book sounds when you first hear about it, its greatest problem is that it doesn’t feel nearly strange enough.
THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS, by China Miéville (Picador, $34.99)
At first glance, this is typical Miéville cleverness: enacting his own story’s key idea is just his flavour of meta.