Sustained whimsy

New York City, WordPress Free Photo Library

A City Dreaming
by Daniel Polansky.
Hodder, 2016.

New York City is the setting for this picaresque fantasy, its episodic nature following the centuries-old tradition of listing the various adventures of a loveable rogue we’re introduced to simply as M.

The reader will soon come up with a list of suitable adjectives for this laid-back antihero of A City Dreaming – moody, morose, a mage who self-identifies as misanthropic but who’s also seen as ‘muscle’, simply because he seems well able to take care of himself. Well, most of the time.

And then there’s the Management, the backroom staff with whom M needs to stay the right side of lest he runs out of vital credit. Oh, and the pair of rival Maenads who treat the city like a pair of chessboard queens determined to achieve dominance. But is there more to this novel than what appears to be an exercise in sustained whimsy?

Obscurity and obfuscation

A London particular, or peasouper

London Particular
by Christianna Brand.
[Also published as Fog of Doubt,
Inspector Cockrill No 5.]
Introduced by P D James.
Pandora Women Crime Writers, Pandora Press, 1988 (1952).

‘In the long, white, firelit drawing-room, the victim bowed and smiled and reeled off his devoirs before the serious work of the evening should begin; within the radius of one fog-bound mile were these seven people, one of whom was very shortly going to murder him.’
— Chapter Four.

In the decades before the first Clean Air Act of 1956 proved pivotal, London’s notorious smogs – a combination of fogs due to the capital’s low lying situation and polluting smoke from household fires and industry – were inconvenient, unpleasant and, especially during the Great Smog of December 1952, very deadly.

Christianna Brand’s crime fiction, set in London’s Maida Vale late one November in the early 1950s, plays on one such smog providing the kind of obscurity that made murder possible, and further allowed suspects the occasion to obfuscate for what they saw as valid reasons.

But who would want to murder a middle-aged visitor from Geneva and, as a layman, how was the stranger able to gasp out in his dying breaths that he had been hit with ‘a mastoid mallet’? It will take a retired police inspector all his experience to approach the truth while severely testing his loyalty to old family friends.

Invisible organs that flex

“Le Drapeau noir” by René Magritte (1937)

The Last Days of New Paris:
A Novella by China Miéville.
Picador, 2017 (2016).

‘In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous. Thibaut’s are strong.’ — Chapter One.

Manifs. Fall Rot. Exquisite corpses. S-blast. Miéville’s alternative history requires the rapid assimilation of new vocabulary by readers who happen to find themselves in an urban landscape, one however that makes little or no sense despite a litany of familiar Parisian streets and landmarks.

And who are these characters from 1950 who negotiate the mean streets of Paris where Nazis, demons, partisans and surrealist manifestations play cat and mouse? Who is Thibaut, whose name recalls Tybalt the Prince of Cats from medieval beast fables and who, not unnaturally, seems to have nine lives? Who is Sam, a photographer whose gender neutral name suggests she may not be what she either seems or claims to be?

And who is Jack Parsons, en route to Prague but holed up in Marseille in 1941, having fallen in with a diverse group of Surrealist “artists and radicals, writers, the philosophers that bleeding-heart Americans wanted to smuggle out of France”? These are questions that eventually find their answers but not before we too find ourselves growing invisible organs that flex at the marvels that litter the pages of this novella.