China Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In his breakthrough novel, 2000’s “Perdido Street Station,” a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who’s trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. In Miéville’s new novella, “The Last Days of New Paris,” the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon’s painting “The Smiling Spider.”** **
“There’s something about the arachnid,” Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. “There’s a very strong tradition of the spider, the arachnid, as something symbolic, something very threatening. Bataille writes about the spider as an avatar of formlessness, this very, very powerful thing. So maybe there’s something tapping into that. I mean, think about Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” sculptures and so on. There’s something about the arachnid that stops up the throat.”
Primal awe and erudite references have always mingled in Miéville’s work—along with a healthy dose of pulp playfulness. His 2010 novel “Kraken,” for instance, gleefully whirls together everything from sea monsters to ray guns. His fear of spiders also has a vintage pulp source: Tarzan movies, which Miéville cites as his gateway to science fiction and fantasy. “I have a lot of drawings from when I was three and maybe four, and Tarzan features heavily. For me, it tended to be the black-and-white films they showed on TV. I remember one very clearly where he meets a giant spider. I have some hazy understanding that some of these creatures and so forth that he was meeting were fantastic, were unreal. And that was immediately what got my attention.”
Miéville was born in 1972 in Norwich, England. His mother, a teacher, raised him and his younger sister; they moved to London when Miéville was very young. Money was tight, but he found enrichment in museums and art galleries, not to mention TV and the movies. Miéville tends to set his novels in fanciful places, from the vaguely steampunk realm of Bas-Lag, in “Perdido Street Station” and its two sequels, to the far-future planet of Arieka, in “Embassytown” (2011). For the hard-boiled crime novel “The City & the City” (2009), he invented two European city-states, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which somehow exist in the same physical space. When he has ventured into the real world, he has mostly stuck with his native London, where he still lives, as in “Kraken,” the urban fantasy “King Rat” (1998), and the mind-bending young-adult book “Un Lun Dun” (2007), in which two London twelve-year-olds discover a hidden, alternate version of their city.
“The Last Days of New Paris” is something of a departure, then: it is set not only across the Channel but in the past—albeit a wildly counterfactual one. Its protagonist is Thibaut, a young resistance fighter in Paris, which is still occupied by the Nazis. The so-called S-Bomb has unleashed “foppish robots” and “flocks of bat-winged businessmen” that roam the city like spectres: “What had been the world’s prettiest city was now populated by its own unpretty imaginings.” When Thibaut stumbles across a cryptic message, he falls into a plot that involves various real-life figures, including the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons and a host of Surrealists, from André Breton to Max Ernst.
It’s hard to read “The Last Days of New Paris” right now and not think of the terrorist attacks that have lately struck the actual Paris and other cities in France. But while Miéville is a deeply political writer—in 2001, he ran for the House of Commons as a socialist, and he has since worked to form a new political party, called Left Unity—the novel feels more madcap than allegorical. “It’s a very playful book,” Miéville said. Its politics have less to do with parties and international relations than with Miéville’s belief in aesthetic subversion as a form of protest and insurrection. The original Surrealists, he says, are too often considered merely quirky. “Kookiness is not a Surrealist position,” he told me. To him, the Surrealists were “incredibly brave political radicals, incredibly insurgent figures. The Surrealists’ positions on things like empire and so forth were decades ahead of many of their contemporaries, including their self-styled radical contemporaries.”
As with his love of science fiction and fantasy, Miéville’s love of Surrealism can be traced back to his youth. “I remember very vividly where I was when I saw my very first big Surrealist exhibition,” he said. “It was a Max Ernst exhibition, and I saw ‘Europe After the Rain.’ It was sort of a Tarzan-and-the-giant-spider moment. I absolutely see it as a hinge. There’s a pre-that-picture me and a post-that-picture me. And I’m very glad to be the post-that-picture me.”
