One of my favorite authors, China Miéville, published two novellas in the past year or so. I wrote about This Census Taker here; The Last Days of New Paris (2016) is the second.
When writing about This Census Taker, I expressed some excitement and optimism about Miéville’s return to the creative tautness that marked much of his earlier writing. The Last Days of New Paris might be the best thing he’s written in the last decade. Supremely creative, tightly plotted, it tells the story of (deep breath here) an alternate timeline where, in 1940, a magical bomb was set off in Paris, bringing to life thousands of manifestations of objects from surrealist poetry and painting. These creatures, while not fully aligned with the Parisian resistance, interrupted the Nazi takeover of the city, allowing pockets of resistance to form more fully, with street battles being fought street by street, arrondissement by arrondissement.
The story is set a decade after the explosion, and the protagonist is a member of the Main à plume (an actively anti-fascist surrealist group), who, along with a mysterious spy, is trying to forward the cause of the resistance. Interspersed throughout are chapters focusing on the arrival of American rocket scientists and occultist Jack Parsons (he’s a real character, who really was both those things and more) in Paris: it is Parsons who assembles and detonates the S-bomb.
The more affection for and insight into surrealism you have, the more you would, I suspect, enjoy all of the descriptions and references. Even lacking that (as I do), it’s pretty fantastic. And, at novella length, an easily consumable read.
I hope these two shorter works mark a return for Miéville, and I eagerly await his next full-length novel.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
I’ve said it before: Miéville just trusts his readers; trusts them to figure things out, trusts them to fill in the blanks created by fantastical descriptions. It certainly runs the risk of reducing the population of readers, but it creates such concise and lovely moments.