MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn some ways, The Last Days of New Paris, as literary art, does not seem to me among the author’s strongest works. Miéville, in his previous books, has created an impressive gallery of strongly individuated characters, but here his powers of characterization are exercised less memorably than usual. ... As occasionally happens in the Miéville oeuvre, the author’s powers of narrative invention run a bit ahead of his powers of narrative structuration, and the reader may have unnecessary difficulty following the action ... The Last Days of New Paris would have been more successful in a more visual medium, as a graphic novel, or even as a film, rather than as a work of prose fiction ... Perhaps the greatest appeal of the volume as we have it is as a kind of allegory of the author’s longstanding relationship with Surrealism.
