At the start of this novella the protagonist, Thibaut, is ambushed by Wehrmacht soldiers between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. That the year in 1950 is not the strangest aspect, as he is rescued by the appearance of the Vélo, a bicycle-like contraption with a queasily organic prow. It is, in fact, a living version of Leonora Carrington’s 1941 sketch ‘I Am an Amateur of Velocipedes’. In this initially joyous, fundamentally chilling book, the art of the surrealists has been weaponised in the fight against Nazism. Surrealism billed itself as a liberation; now is it part of the Liberation. ‘New Paris’ is stalked by versions of André Breton’s ‘Exquisite Corpse’, sunflowers from Dorothea Tanning, Grace Pailthorpe’s ‘Sandbumtious’ and Max Ernst’s ‘Celebes’ — abbreviated as ‘manifs (demonstrations).The Eiffel Tower is still there, damaged, with only its top floating extant. The Nazis have difficulty fighting back. Paris is contained and they are losing the aesthetic arms race, given how imitative and second-rate fascist art is. They have, therefore, entered into an expedient pact with Hell.
Nazis in league with demons is a well-handled trope (the film Hellboy, the comic Fiends of the Eastern Front), but Miéville makes the concept his own by having it as another of their clichés; schlock-horror kitsch pitched against avant-garde innovation. He is too subtle not to build into the novella an awareness of the belligerence of early 20th-century art: the paeans to destruction in Marinetti; the infamous quote by Breton that the simplest act of surrealism is to ‘fire randomly into a crowd’; and Dalí’s boast that surrealism was ‘destructive’. (He gets short shrift here, blessedly.)
Thibaut will eventually encounter Sam, whom he assumes is an American Special Operations officer, but who claims she is a curator, documenting the extravagances of New Paris, and there is a plan to be foiled.
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