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.