What I Am Reading: "The Last Days of New Paris" by China Miéville

It was interesting to find a book that married a highbrow concept to a plot straightforward enough to have come out of any video game. This is the second China Miéville book I have read, after I did King Rat a few Octobers ago. The backstory and B story is fairly straightforward: during World War 2, each side employs occultists and magicians, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of The Milkweed Triptych (but less fleshed-out and more backgrounded). As one agent travels through Vichy France in 1941, on his way to magically activate a Golem in Prague (reminiscent of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or perhaps I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream the game), he first spends some time with a group of semi-Resistance Surrealists. At first disbelieving of their lack of seriousness, he comes to see an overlap between their energy and that of his master, Aleister Crowley, and draws their energy into his bomb-like activation device. As it transpires, a thief steals the box, attempting to bring it to Paris and sell it. In the course of a psychic Nazi raid, the device activates, and all of the magical and Surrealist energy it contains is released in the "S-blast." Paris is turned into New Paris, a ruined cityscape where the creations of the Surrealists have manifested (and are called "manifs"), somewhat reminiscent of the manifestations of retro-futurism in The Gernsback Continuum, but with an actual plot mechanism and not just "semiotic memory" being the cause. Last reference, I promise.

Anyway, in this case, it means that the built environment has become jumbled and juxtaposed, with buildings transformed into their nonsensical versions. For example, Notre Dame manifests as André Breton had suggested it: with one square tower filled with blood, and the other with sperm. People make calls through Dalí's lobster telephone or wind their way between Toyen's birdcages (apparently Miéville made heavy use of a questionnaire filled out by prominent surrealists entitled "On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Establishment of a City"). Beyond the changes to the built environment, the living things from surrealist art have also manifested. These include The Elephant Celebes and wolf-tables, but the most relevant to the plot and backstory is The Exquisite Corpse, the result of a parlor game where one participant draws (or paints, or collages, etc.) part of a body, and then folds the paper and passes it to another, who adds another part without referring to the first. Through this landscape moves Thibault, reluctant cell leader for the Main à Plume, a Surrealist resistance group (real, but not militant in "our timeline"). They are antagonistic toward the Free French, reflective of real rivalries and opposition between French resistance organizations.

The A story picks up in 1950 after Thibault, who is a natural Surrealist skilled at automatic shooting (the wartime version of automatic writing) has lost most of his unit in an attempt to acquire what are, essentially, magic pajamas (from a Simone Yoyotte poem). He comes across a woman named Sam, who at first claims to be making a photographic record of The Last Days of New Paris. Managing to lasso an Exquisite Corpse, they travel to ground zero of the device that set off the S-blast at Sam's instigation, but the device itself turns out to be of no use to them. Sam reveals that she is actually a secret agent, to Thibault's displeasure, and is attempting to learn about and foil a Nazi project entitled Fall Rot. Since the S-blast was not only Surrealist in nature, but also occultist, the city is also infested with grotesque, lumbering demons. These are partially controlled by the Nazis as the result of a series of treaties with Hell. They are always working on improving their use of demons and finding a way to use the wild manifs, which Thibault has witnessed in the form of a bicycle-centaur from Leonora Carrington's I am an Amateur of Velocipedes. Rapidly flaneuring the irrational city, they find that the Nazi occult spin-off religion has been working with Dr. Mengle's scientists to bring about Fall Rot, a massive Panzer centaur. The Nazi tank man's binding ritual is interrupted, and he inaugurates his rampage with the Nazi scientists. He rotates his gun barrel through the flesh of his massive torso, which grotesquely knits itself back together afterwords.

Sam, fortunately, isn't an OSS or SOE secret agent, but reveals herself to be an agent of Hell sent to investigate the Nazis, and is able to call in reinforcements in time for a hole to swallow up Fall Rot. However, she and Thibault realize that Fall Rot was only a means to an end, as the energy released by his destruction have created a new manif, the watercolor Self Portrait of Adolf Hitler. This faceless manif has the power to change people, buildings, and entire streets to the anodyne, depopulated watercolor cityscapes of Hitler's art career. He is too quick for Sam, but Thibault manages to kill it with the remains of his pet Exquisite Corpse, which was earlier dismembered in the laboratory. He and New Paris both survive the end of the story; Miéville presents the story in the afterword as having been a tale told to him by an elderly Thibault, who has somehow crossed over into our reality.

I rush to assure you that I have only a passing familiarity with Surrealism; the sources are from Miéville's own kindly-provided index (and here is a Medium post I found cataloging them, thank you to Mr. Nicky Martin). He clearly did a lot of research on the subject, and I'm sure art historians will parse a thousand easter eggs. I will lower my brow and return to my first note: the story itself, of Thibault and Sam, is as straightforward as that in a normal video game. Thibault acquires his instrument of power, the pajamas, as well as other single-use weapons such as a Surrealist playing card (based off the Marseilles deck created by Surrealists, with suites Black Stars (for dreams), Red Flames (for desire), Black Locks (for knowledge), and Red Wheels (for revolution); and the Royal cards replaced by Genius, Siren, and Magus) that gets him out of a jam. He builds his party with Sam (armed with a magic camera) and the Exquisite Corpse; they pursue a MacGuffin, in the form of the S-blast bomb. They face first a mini-boss, Fall Rot, and then a surprise final boss, the Self Portrait. There’s nothing wrong with that, this somewhat “straightforward” vehicle let me explore Surrealism comfortably. Maybe that makes me a simpleton, but I think that the book was more about exploring the concept anyway.