Lobster Telephone

I don't know why I often open these posts by writing about why I picked up a book - maybe it's important for me to tell the story of how I read a story? Anyways, I wasn't even aware of The Last Days of New Paris until I went to the library. I'd already seen that they had a copy of Railsea, and this was next to it on the shelf. I went "Oh, cool!", checked it out, and then I read it! Cool story, huh?!

 

 

It was actually kind of fun to have a book by an author I knew but that I knew nothing about, even whether it was fiction or non-fiction. Especially after having read October, I thought there was a good chance that this was the story of the Paris Commune or something. As I eventually learned, though, it is in fact a work of fiction. Somewhere between a slight novel and an extended novella, it's an enjoyable stand-alone work that builds off a movement from our own world while also sketching out the contours for a new world in fiction.

MINI SPOILERS

Specifically, this book is set in an alternate reality. The first divergence we learn is that the Nazis seem to have won World War II; at least, in 1950 they still occupy France. It's a little unclear whether they achieved a total military victory, or if the United States failed to enter the war or what.

We soon learn about the more spectacular divergence, though. Due to something called the S-Bomb, art has come to life. Termed "Manifs", as a shorthand for Manifestations, various paintings, sculptures, and ideas from poems and stories have emerged into the real world.  Most of these are works of surrealism, and there seems to be some degree to which surrealists can... not exactly control the manifs, but summon or nudge them. Manifs are powerful and can be dangerous; they usually attack the Nazi occupiers, but bystanders have learned to be wary as well.

The book is filled with references to the names of Surrealists and other artists, and I was curious how many were real: I definitely know major names like Dali, Magritte, Ernst and Miro, along with a few fellow-travellers like Picasso, but there were many more names I didn't recognize. The very end of the book includes notes on the inspirations, and from spot-checking a few on Wikipedia it seems like they're all real, although as Mieville writes in the Afterword some of the specific works were created (in our reality) after the years depicted in this book.

Prior to reading those end notes, I kind of had the assumption that this book was sort of a put-on, mixing together real historical and fictional invented artists. That in turn made me think of 1960s and 1970s American counter-culture fiction, specifically Discordianism and the Illuminati, which were really formative for me in my teenage years. Those works often deliberately anchored on a real fact and spun up conspiratorial fiction around it; a somewhat native reader would go look up what they'd read, find some confirmations in the encyclopedia, and assume that the whole thing must be true. A less naive reader would delight in the ambiguity of not being able to distinguish reality from imagination. This was especially effective in the pre-Internet era, when it took significantly more effort to cross-reference and check sources. Anyways, I hadn't previously really considered a continuity between this strain of counter-cultural writing and Surrealism, but they do seem like they have some similar motivations and expressions: both are loosely anarchic and leftist, seek to poke at the strictures of the establishment, open up spaces for questioning, delighting in absurdity. I'm not aware of a direct lineage between the two movements, though. It might be one of those impulses that cyclically emerges every couple of generations.

Surrealism is probably my favorite art genre, and it was fun to read a whole book about it. I don't know a whole lot about art and hadn't realized that there was such a political dimension to (at least some of) the artists' works. I'm glad that it's a politics I can admire! But, that may not be coincidental - something deeper is linking the meaning and the expression. (If I like the fruits, there's a good chance I like the tree as well.) Surrealism isn't really a strong force today, and I don't think the few artists working in that tradition necessarily have the same motivations as the founders of that school. That said, I do really enjoy my Jacek Yerka giclee!

China Mieville does have some consistent interests and techniques across his book. Other than the Bas-Lag trilogy he doesn't really do series, but it is fun to see some familiar concepts crop up from book to book. Along those lines, while this book certainly is a separate reality from all of his others, there are still some interesting elaborations of ideas I've seen from him previously.

One of the earliest passages includes a reference of a Velocipede, a fusion of woman and bicycle into a single deadly warrior. That sounded a lot like the Remade from New Crobuzon, and as it arrived early in the book I was expecting to encounter more creations like that; but it ends up being a one-off.

I can't put my hand on the passage at the moment, but there's a tossed-off reference to "Torque" that gave me pause. In the Bas-Lag books, "Torque" is roughly equivalent to magic: it's wild and dangerous (even causing cancer), capable of reshaping reality. Through the brief reference here, I thought more about how it implies twisting energy, bending an existing thing to change it. Again, "torque" isn't really its own thing in this book, but I feel like I have a slightly better understanding now of how China holds that idea in his mind.

The main purpose of this book, though, is clearly about art. A lot has been written about art, specifically about the role of art in confronting violent and evil political movements. I think often about Kurt Vonnegut's dour pronouncement that:

"Every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

In some ways, this book feels like an artist's (and when I say "artist" I really mean any maker of creative works; although painters are the most common and striking of the artists depicted here China clearly is referring to all creatives) fantasy: what if art could make a difference? What if a creation could actually kill a Nazi? What if a poem could protect someone?

That would be simple, though, so it's cool that China complicates it: not only "good people" can create art, after all. There is art by evil people as well. In this book, we encounter the "Brekerman", a manifestation of art created by Arno Breker, an official artist of Nazi Germany. And the Nazis being Nazis, there are all sorts of experiments and projects to perform research and build things that may be of use in the war. One of these is the third major difference in this timeline: Nazis have successfully summoned up devils from hell (!!!) to roam the streets of New Paris. Serving a somewhat similar role to Manifs but fundamentally different, devils mostly target the Free French Resistance, Main a Plume and other foes, but are also dangerous to their Nazi handlers as well. Thibault, the protagonist of the novel, is a Surrealist artist himself, and some of his greatest distress comes from seeing how manifs can act like devils, devils can act like manifs, and manifs can be used to bad ends.

One last thought before Mega Spoilers: I periodically thought about Roberto Bolaño while reading this. He and China are both public leftists, but in the past I haven't felt much of a connection between their fiction. However, a book about artists is very much up Bolaño's alley! Infrarealism certainly seems like a cousin to surrealism, putting these on similar grounds. The fragility of artists is contrasted against a backdrop of military dictatorship or looming fascism. That's implicit in something like The Savage Detectives or Distant Star, and Nazi Literature In The Americas kind of feels like a mirror image to The Last Days of New Paris: both are essentially catalogs of artists, although I think all of Bolaño's are fictional (right-wing) artists while China's are real (left-wing) artists.

One reason I haven't really compared them in the past is that Bolaño's work doesn't really have a sense of unreality in the way that China and many of my other favorite authors do. (2666 might be an exception, but even there it's a much more distant and subtle impression.) I get the impression that Bolaño intentionally hews away from magical realism, escaping one of the dominant forms of Latin American writing, while China intentionally chose to create and grow the New Weird to swim against the realist currents of English literature. So maybe both authors are animated by a spirit of iconoclasm and rebellion, but that manifests in very different ways given their different historical and cultural contexts.

MEGA SPOILERS

After finishing the book, I flipped back to the copyright page to see when it was written. It was published in 2016, so I'd imagine written maybe in 2015 or earlier, definitely before the election of Donald Trump in the US. The themes of artists' resistance to a fascist takeover seem prescient. But of course, China has been active on the (socialist) left for his whole life, so he was already seeing the world in this way, not jolted into it as many others were. It's no coincidence that many of the especially resonant pieces of art that seemed to speak to that moment were created before the moment, by artists who contemplate the long history of struggle against brutal ideologies. I'm thinking here particularly of No Horses by the band Garbage, but there are countless other examples.

The plot of the book is a bit meandering, mostly Thibault wandering around New Paris in 1950, intercut with flashbacks leading up to the S-Bomb in 1941. He connects with Sam, a photographer with a hidden background and agenda, and travels with her. They hear references to "Fall Rot" which becomes a sort of MacGuffin; they eventually learn that Fall Rot is a terrestially-created demon. Sacrificing manifs (destroying art) unleashes energy, which can be directed to summon up devils from Hell; Josef Mengele and a blasphemous priest use these energies to steal power from Hell and create a demon under their own direct control.

Thibault and Sam (who turns out to be a double-agent working for Hell against the Nazis) succeed in defeating Fall Rot, but doing so unleashes even more energy, which then animates the ultimate Nazi Manif: the art of Adolf Hitler. His wan, incompetent, limpid, underwhelming watercolors blast onto the landscape of New Paris: the grime and graffiti and chaos of real, lived, distressed spaces are destroyed, replaced with featureless, boring, inoffensive houses. It's art annihilating art, the talentless absence replacing beautiful complexity.

This kind of heightens and ties together these meditations on art and politics and action in a really compelling way that I feel I can't fully unpack at the moment but feels deeply resonant. "Hitler used to be an artist" is one of those interesting minor factoids that most people know, a bit of trivia; but for someone who is an artist, I imagine that's an almost existential challenge. Am I so much like him? How could a creative person create such misery? Doesn't this fact destroy any plausible argument that art can uplift us, improve us, brighten the world? It's a tough question, and I really admire China for wrestling with it.

The main story is followed by an Afterword, which feels very much like an 1800s Forward: in this, China Mieville describes how he came to learn this story, thanks to a long interview with a significantly aged Thibault. It's clearly made-up, but China is such a good writer that it nevertheless feels convincing.

END SPOILERS

I've gone from not knowing that this book existed to being surprised that it's not better-known or more talked-about. It may suffer a bit from being more closely tied to our own reality, so people who mostly know China for his wholly original and mind-blowing world-creation may be less impressed by this; but personally I think what he's accomplished here by weaving together history, surrealist art and fantasy is really impressive. In the Afterword he writes something about how he kept expecting there to be many other stories that could be told in New Paris, and I felt the same way while reading this: it's one of those great novels that opens up a space that seems like it could accommodate an entire lifetime of new stories. Knowing China, though, I'm sure he'll be more fulfilled in finding yet another new world to will into existence.

She

There are several reasons why I'll pick up a new book to read. Most often I've read other works by the author and want more from them. Sometimes I'll get a strong recommendation from a friend or family member who knows my tastes and interests. Occasionally a review or article will catch my attention. I think this is the first time I've read a book solely because of a dumb meme. I wasn't familiar with the reference, did a little Googling, discovered that the book in question was at my library, picked it up and expanded my horizons a bit!

 

 

The book in question is "She" by H. Rider Haggard. I haven't read anything by him before; he's best known for "King Solomon's Mines", which I've heard of, definitely haven't read, and don't think I've seen any adaptations of.

MINI SPOILERS

She is an adventure novel, written in the late 1800s and set in a fictional area of Africa. As the (modern) introduction explains, Haggard had a fair amount of personal experience with the more developed ( / exploited / colonized ) areas of Africa, but he intentionally cast this novel in the style of a more mythologized and mysterious Africa. Several decades ago, most of the interior of the continent was represented on maps with a big blank space; by the time he was writing, those maps had mostly filled in, but the idea of "darkest Africa" still animated the reading public.

Like other novels of the era, there's a pat wrap-around in which the author comes to explain how this document came into his hands, very much like Frankenstein or Dracula or something of that sort. Also like those books, there's a focus on a singular, ambiguously antagonistic subject: someone you can easily describe as "evil" but who has some intriguing characteristics, whether charisma, pity or resolve.

The exotic setting of the book made me think a little of H. P. Lovecraft, but without the same level of weirdness. Lovecraft (and most fantasy novels) posit that the world is fundamentally different from how we think it is, with powerful magical forces that may be hidden but influence how things work. She has more of a mystical feel to it, the idea that there are little nooks and crannies that we haven't discovered yet: hidden lands, certain properties of life. Late in the novel She emphasizes that nothing She does is magic, just science that they don't yet understand.

Overall I feel most comfortable describing this as an "adventure" novel, but I think most "adventure" books I've personally read are set in mostly barren, desolate or otherwise uninhabited lands: Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Robinson Crusoe and so on. Here, there is a unique, imaginary land, but it's also filled with an entire new (invented) civilization, headed by this one mysterious, alluring, captivating figure. 

Really, what I think this book most reminds me of is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There's gawking at bizarre customs, traveling to an exotic land, a strong sense of mysticism. I think that Indiana Jones was based on old radio serials, which in turn were likely inspired by H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other writers of adventure novels.

The titular She of this book doesn't appear until a good hundred pages or so in - it's a very slow burn. The book is narrated by Horace, a middle-aged man who is described by everyone (including himself) as very ugly. Horace adopts a young boy named Leo, who, we learn, descends from a two-thousand-year-old lineage of Greeks, who have maintained a family legend of a fantastical escape from a hidden land in Africa. Along with their faithful servant Job and a Muslim trader named Muhammed, they follow the instructions on ancient artifacts to find their way to this ancestral location. (More plot in Mega Spoilers below.)

Probably because of that introductory meme, I did think of "Lord of the Rings" a decent amount while reading this, although oddly enough not so much with Galadriel. But the character of Job reminded me a lot of Sam in Lord of the Rings. I don't think that Tolkien based Sam on Job; rather, I think that both English authors were reflecting a certain class dynamic. This type of character is a beloved servant who is basically a member of the family, looked on kindly but also with some indulgence. It's a paternalistic mindset, loving but unequal. Both Job and Sam are blunt, honest, brave, resourceful, slightly dumb: many things go over their heads, but they have unquestionably good hearts.

While reading this, I was reminded of an essay I read a while back (which of course I can't find now) about English fairy tales. From the middle ages up through the present day, fantastical English stories tend to follow a similar pattern: the protagonist is a regular person from the "real" world; they leave home and travel to a different place; they have adventures there, solving problems in that place but also personally improving; and at the end they leave the different place and return home, bringing their memories and hard-earned wisdom. As America follows the English tradition, this seems very normal and we don't really question it (and folks like Joseph Campbell describe it as a universal structure); but not all traditions are like that. In other countries, fairy tales may feature traveling to another land, but then staying there, shaping that land to reflect their own home. Or the strangeness may enter into our own land, and either be integrated or fought off. Anyways, She and Lord of the Rings both very much follow the standard English pattern, but most fantastical English novels do so again I think it's more a matter of the authors writing within their own traditions than intentionally copying one another.

MEGA SPOILERS

As soon as I learned that this book was set in Africa, a question I came prepared to ask was, "How racist is this book?" My answer is that it's a bit racist, but not as racist as I was expecting for an English novel of this era and setting. The Amahagger tribe in particular is more surprising than stereotypical; they lack the technology possessed by the Englishmen (particularly firearms), but overall seem confident, stable, and, if not exactly prosperous, certainly not deprived. They have some interesting and surprisingly interesting views on gender, with women initiating courtship and ancestry being traced matrilinearly. The individuals we meet like Billali and Ustane are very admirable: they're honest, compassionate (within the bounds of their culture), and brave. But, like in The Temple of Doom, there are also shocking and gross aspects to their culture, in particular a cannibalistic ritual of "hot potting".

The Amahagger would have killed the English, except they received word from She to expect white-skinned visitors, and warn them to spare them for her own inspection. There's a lot of build-up to She, and it mostly pays off: she's the most eloquently spoken character in the book, has the most interesting backstory, is by far the most powerful. Introduced as a sorceress, she is apparently over two thousand years old, having previously loved Leo's very distant ancestor. There are some hints in the text that she's not actually the same person, that occasionally a young child is taken and groomed to be a successor; but as far as the words of She go, there's only been the one.

She goes by many names. The Amahagger give her the full name of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, which I instantly recognized as a line from Rumpole of the Bailey - it always cracked me up, and it's funny that decades later I finally realize that it's a reference! Her original name was Ayesha, apparently pronounced "Ashha".

Like many novels of this era the pacing can feel pretty slow and odd to modern readers like me. It's subtitled "A History of Adventure", and feels like it should be pretty action-packed, but most of it is characters walking around, looking at things, and talking with one another, often about history. (Again, not entirely dissimilar to Lord of the Rings!) There's basically a shipwreck, one fight scene, and a dangerous leap over a rocky chasm... and that's about all the (physical) excitement over three hundred pages.

I was really curious how She would resolve, and got increasingly nervous as the end of the novel approached without much development. It didn't seem like there would be enough pages to wrap things up. It does end up being a pretty satisfying ending, though, with some surprises and a good amount of resolution.

END SPOILERS

I'm really glad that I read this book. Not so much on its own merits - it's fine - but it feels like it fills in an important gap in the history of books that I care about, spanning from Beowulf through David Mitchell. Its Victorian setting and fantastic material are adjacent to some of my current passions, which heightened my enjoyment of this and also helps contextualize more modern works that riff off of it or just extend that tradition.

Railsaw

"Railsea" is a super-fun China Mieville book. It stands on its own without tying into his other worlds, but will feel familiar to readers, as it similarly conjures an original, remarkable world. I find myself often thinking "How did he think of that?!" as his imagination barrels forward in ever more unexpected directions.

MINI SPOILERS

The central conceit of Railsea emerges relatively early on; unlike, say, The City & the City, where it can take quite a while to intuit exactly what's going on, Railsea has some helpful passages of exposition, carefully spaced throughout, in which the omniscient narrator speaks directly to you and lays things out. Between this and characters explaining things to one another through dialogue, the oddness is more clear. (I wouldn't say I necessarily prefer this approach, as I generally prefer spec fic that leaves it to the reader to suss things out, but it does make this a more approachable read without dumbing anything down.)

Anyways: To oversimplify a bit, the "railsea" of the title is, literally, a "sea" made out of endless railroad. There are tons and tons of tracks, branching off, switching, joining, occasionally changing gauge. The rails run over a very hazardous earth, and underneath the earth are a huge variety of monstrous predators, including enormous molerats, earwigs, earthworms, rabbits, owls and more. They will periodically "breach", emerging from the earth to feed and wreak havoc. Trains serve the role of ships, traveling along the rails, navigating through safer or more dangerous areas.

While the novel almost entirely unfolds on the railsea, we learn about the overall cosmology as well. "Islands" of land emerge from the railsea, on which live most of the people, forming cities and farming and such. Far up above the islands are multiple layers of heavily polluted sky, poisonous to anyone who enters; "divers" will occasionally suit up and ascend into the murky reaches above.

The book as a whole feels like an homage to, and partially a pastiche of, Moby-Dick. The protagonist Sham stands in for Ishmael, the mole-hunter Medes replaces the Pequod, Captain Naphi plays Captain Ahab, Mocker-Jack represents Moby Dick, Mbendo replaces Queequeg, and on and on. Naphi is obsessed with her Great Southern Mole-Rat and risks much in pursuit of her quarry. A fun aspect of this novel, though, is that this is not at all unusual in the railsea: we learn of dozens of captains who likewise have a single, larger-than-life quarry that they relentlessly pursue; not only that, but they have a term for them, "philosophy", and ascribe them deep symbolism and purpose: one captain's "philosophy" might represent loss, another's dangerous knowledge, another's mortality, another's community, another's the sublime, and so on. The whole thing ends up feeling like a really fun, winking commentary on English Literature classes.

The writing itself is really fun. After the first few chapters, the omniscient narrator (who seems to be someone from this alternate world and not Mieville himself) gets increasingly chatty, commenting on what is happening, how you might be feeling about it, and so on. One of my favorite parts is a chapter that digresses on the text's use of the "&" symbol. This is one of the more striking aspects of the novel; a typical sentence might read like:

A storm of faces hanging on him & listening as off in other bits of wherever they were Kiragabo & Vurinam were dancing together, & someone gave Shame another drink, & someone said "So what was is you found on the wreck?" & "Aaaaaah," he was saying, tip-tapped the side of his nose, never you mind, secrets, that was what.

As the narrator eventually explains, many centuries ago writers would have used the word "and" in these situations, but in the world of the railsea, where everything curves on itself and folds over and splits and combines, the "&" symbol is far more appropriate. Which I love! I also love the later sections where the narrator reluctantly stops writing about a particular storyline to focus on something happening elsewhere, then grows increasingly apologetic at how long it's taking to return to the cliffhanger we left on.

All of this writing is really fun and original. I do have to say (not at all as a slight on this book, just in praise of the original) that Moby-Dick itself is probably even more creative and original. I haven't read that book since college, and reading this sparked a lot of memories for me and makes me want to revisit it. I remember being amazed as the novel abruptly shifts into a Shakespearean play, or a Borges-style catalog, or a scientific treatise.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator wistfully recounts some of the other possible stories that could have been told instead of this one - the wild horses that gallop along the tracks, or the political intrigues of two evenly matched islands. This seems to be a very common thing in China's novels: he creates an amazing world that's wholly original and wholly compelling, which could serve as a fertile basis for a writer's entire career (in the style of Lovecraft or Howard or Tolkien); and yet, with the partial exception of the Bas-Lag books, he'll only write a single story set there and then move on. Which I guess does make me kind of think of Tolkien after all, as there's something especially compelling about encountering a single tale that seems to be floating in a sea of other tales, each untold but adding weight to the one we do read.

A final thought: I really liked Sham, and thought he's one of the best Mieville protagonists I've run encountered. He's not especially good at what he does, but has a good heart and good instincts. He doesn't always act on those instincts, but I can relate to his indecision.

Oh! Post-final thought: it's interesting that one author has written two entirely separate novels about fantastic trains, between this and Iron Council. They are kind of opposite conceits in some ways, as Railsea has a multiplicity of overabundant rail, while Iron Council has free-roaming track that moves along with the train. Both of them seem to arise out of a loose adaptation of a deep understanding of the historical development of the railroads, particularly the over-investment and over-development of rails and the self-inflicted wounds capitalism inflicted on itself in the mid-to-late 1800s. As a Brit, Mieville is probably drawing on his homeland's experiences, but they're basically identical to America's, just experienced a few decades earlier. Anyways, this ended up being yet another unexpected entry in my recent run of books about the follies of destructive competition in early railroad development.

END SPOILERS

I ended up enjoying Railsea more than I thought I would. It isn't often mentioned as a favorite book among Mieville fans. I wouldn't say that I like this more than, say, The City & the City or The Scar, but I'd put it on a similar tier with them. It's less macabre than the Bas-Lag books and a slightly quicker read while still feeling weighty and interesting.