The Last Days of New Paris | review by Rafe McGregor
by China Miéville, Picador, paperback, £9.00,23 February 2017, ISBN 9781447296553
China Miéville has been publishing speculativefiction for the better part of three decades, beginning with King Rat in 1998. In the course of thiscareer, he has become known as the foremost exponent of the New Weird, rivalledonly by Jeff VanderMeer, and last year he published The Book of Elsewhere,co-authored with none other than Keanu Reeves. I defined the New Weird as philosophicalin virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-outworldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the alienationwithin ourselves in Weird Fiction, Old, New, and In-Between, also publishedlast year. It is difficult to avoid appreciating The Last Days of New Paris in one of two misleading contexts. The first is as an Axis victory alternative history along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle or Len Deighton’s 1978 SS-GB, both of which have been released as popular television series, the former in 2015 and the latter in 2017. Miéville weaves two narratives together – one set in a recognisable France of 1941 and the other in an unrecognisable Paris of 1950 – and populates each with a mix of real and fictional people, but doesnot invite one to ruminate on the possible consequences of, for example,Franklin Roosevelt’s assassination (Dick) or a Luftwaffe victory in the Battle of Britain (Deighton). Instead, thegeopolitics that led up to and followed on from the ‘S-Blast’ (presumably‘surrealist blast’), the explosion that both created living manifestations ofsurrealist works of art and opened the gates of hell, are for the most partcircumstantial. The second context, which may be related to the first, is tosee the novella as a response to the global rise of nationalism, often inextreme forms, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but it isneither a call for political resistance nor a naïve allegory of art’s revolutionarypower.
The Last Days of New Paris consists of ninechapters, with the odd numbers devoted to events in the 1950 present and theeven numbers to events in the 1941 past. The story is followed by an afterwordand a notes section and my only criticism concerns the inclusion of thissupplementary material. The afterword is subtitled ‘On Coming to Write The LastDays of New Paris’ and constitutes a curious conceit in which Miéville claimsto have met Thibaut, the fictional protagonist of 1950, and to have merelyedited the manuscript passed to him. This was a common device in Victorianfiction, but contemporary readers require no such faux guarantees and thesuperfluity is exacerbated by Miéville’s reference to non-existent sketches hehas (not) included. The notes are explanations of the artworks referred to in the narrativeand feel gratuitous in an age where reader research is almost effortless. Miéville’stextual representations of these works are a seamless merging of the realistic withthe oneiric and his expert evocation of the pervasive sense of the strange thatis New Paris equips the reader with all he or she requires to experience theintense pleasure afforded by the novella.
New Paris is Paris after the S-Blast, whichoccurred in 1941. In Miéville’s alternative Europe, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) – the German drive to the Channel in May1940 – was sufficient to cause the collapse of France, making Fall Rot (Case Red, the push west andsouth the following month) unnecessary. The S-Blast transformed Paris from acity of occupation to a city of resistance, with various French factions risingup against the Germans and the ‘battalions from below’ rising up to join thechaos. The resistance includes the Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle andbacked by the United States, and the Mainà plume, the surrealist irregulars, some of whom (like Thibaut) have beenable to harness the power released by the detonation. The most significant effectof the S-Blast was not the release of hell’s minions (who show only a passinginterest in the city), but to create the living manifestations of surrealist artworks,‘manifs’, that roam the streets either on their own or under the less thanperfect command of surrealist or SS handlers. By 1950 the Germans have sealedthe ‘city become free-fire zone andhunting grounds for the impossible’ and are attempting to destroy the resistersby all available means, including the control of manifs and devils and thecreation of manifs of their own, using the work of Nazi artists likeArno Breker. The S-Blast has of course given literal meaning to metaphors suchas art coming to life, having a life of its own, and being a form of life.
The Last Days of New Paris is an extraordinarily original work that underscoresMiéville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation. The opening scene is wildly fantastic,a suicidal charge by the Vélo – the manifestation of LeonoraCarrington’s I am an Amateur of Velocipedes (1941), a bicycle-woman centaur – at the German lines.There is also a satisfyingly overdetermined symmetry in the work’s design asthe onset is bookended by the appearance of Fall Rot, a Panzer III-giantman centaur, in the first stage of the story’s tripartite climax. The symmetryis superbly complex: in the same way that science and the supernatural are thedual interests of Jack Parsons, the real-life protagonist of the 1941narrative, so Fall Rot has been created by the combination of the biologicalexperimentation of Josef Mengele and the perverted faith of Robert Alesch, a Catholicpriest who collaborated with the Nazis. In a further parallel, both of theplots begin with the arrival of an American on the scene, Parsons in VichyMarseilles in 1941 and an American photojournalist named Sam in the free partof Paris in 1950. Sam is researching her own book, The Last Days of NewParis, a photographic essay-within-a-novella that pays homage to Dick’s TheGrasshopper Lies Heavy novel-within-a-novel.
Miévilleis too sophisticated a writer to promote a conception of art as essentiallyopposed to oppression and his mention of Breker and the second part of theclimax (which I shall not reveal) shows that he is well aware of the variety ofends art can serve. While Breton’s surrealism provided a Marxist opposition to Europeanfascism and American Fordism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism provided activeand enthusiastic support for Mussolini and the fascist sympathies of manyprominent modernists are well documented. Miéville is concerned with surrealismin particular over and above art more generally because movements like surrealism(and now New Weird) resist nationalism and elitism in virtue of beingpolitico-artistic movements in the first instance. Surrealism is not anartistic movement in the service of Marxism, but a Marxist artistic movement. Assuch, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than arevolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing artas a means to political ends. The link from New Paris to the contemporary worldcomes in the perfectly pitched anti-climax with which the narrative concludes,as Thibaut takes it upon himself to write his own book, to start ‘from scratch,redo history, make it mine.’ In Thibaut’s return to the fray to write hisrevolution, Miéville urges readers to their own artistic revolt, to the reconception of artas essentially rather than circumstantially political and the New Weird asessentially rather than circumstantially resistant to nationalism, elitism, andrelated mass harms.
