This helps give the novel the quality of a dreamlike tour through a gallimaufry of riotous imaginings, or a world-building prologue to future tales set in this alt-history New Paris, as the notes imply might be forthcoming. Seemingly alone among the denizens of the ruined and anarchic city, they are untouchable flaneurs, insouciant superheroes. Thibaut is wearing bulletproof pyjamas, and a woman he teams up with, Sam, can summon a destructive wind. What there isn’t much of is dramatic suspense, since, when things get hairy, the characters reveal hitherto unsuspected magical powers. The prose reserves its right to outbreaks of sly wit: “Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies in outdated coats shout endless monologues of special offers and clog planes’ propellers with their own questionable meat.” For all its hypnagogic gusto, the text does arguably overuse the word “thing”, as the initial placeholder noun for some new apparition, as well as the “wails” of victims, but overall the effect is exhilaratingly precise and serious, as though Albert Camus had rewritten Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is quite a feat to narrate all this in a terse, naturalistic style that is neither overtly silly nor po-faced.
Their monographs and catalogues now almanacs.” The novella is exhilaratingly precise and serious, as though Albert Camus had rewritten Raiders of the Lost Ark Since the surrealist outbreak, the narrator observes, “curators have been Virgils. At the same time, in New Paris itself, everyone is furiously consulting art history textbooks and obscure religious texts, which have proven critical weapons of information warfare even if, as many grumble, they aren’t true. The novella comes with an extensive set of notes at the back detailing the sources for all these visions in surrealist art and writing, as well as a pleasantly traditional afterword in which the author claims to have heard the story first hand from its surviving hero.
And central to the story is a living version of the “ Exquisite Corpse” by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy: half human, half mechanical jumble, with an old man’s head crowned by a caterpillar and leaf – as the narrator puts it, “hedgerow chic”. The top half of the Eiffel tower hangs suspended in the sky, the bottom half having disappeared. There are wolf-tables, and a giant baby’s face emerging from the ground. In the Seine there are sharks with canoe-seats for backs. The bestiary of surrealist “ manifs”, or manifestations, that Miéville parades before us is dazzling.
0 kommentar(er)
