Keanu Reeves holds a unique place in both cinema history and popular culture – his films have been cool and hip, like the Bill and Ted movies, arthouse like My Own Private Idaho and A Scanner Darkly, and Hollywood A-list like the Matrix and John Wick films. He has influenced Australians such as comedian Diana Nguyen and funk metal band Mammal.
He also plays bass in his band Dogstar and, in 2021, co-created and authored the comic book series BRZRKR, thereby creating the universe in which this novel, The Book of Elsewhere, is set (Reeves introduces it online with a flurry of enthusiastic gesticulations). The novel is a collaboration between Reeves and China Miéville, a writer of the “new weird” genre.
But is The Book of Elsewhere any good? Yes it is. Some of it doesn’t quite work, but it succeeds on many levels.
Since The Book of Elsewhere’s world was first in comic book form, the question of why this is now a novel must be raised. After all, Alan Moore famously disowned some of his graphic novel creations, such as Watchmen, claiming that the story he was telling was meant for the medium of the graphic novel and not the film adaptation that it inspired. With this in mind, Reeves and Miéville’s book treads on blatantly graphic novel/comic book territory. It succeeds in being a novel, often allowing Miéville’s wonderfully descriptive words to flourish, but it would be equally or more powerful as a graphic novel.
The plot, extremely simplified, involves an 80,000-year-old human named B, who hatches out of an egg, adult and anew, each time he dies. It also follows a similarly-aged prehistoric deer-pig stuck in the same quasi-immortal dilemma (and its blind hatred for B throughout the millennia), both woven into a contemporary setting in which B works in a Special Operations section of the military. There’s lots more to it – its later chapters weave around many important subplots – but that’s (one of) the backbones of the story.
The book, like a Tarantino movie, happily steals/pays homage to a variety of sources, most notably a mix of Russell Mulcahy’s 1986 film Highlander and the more contemporary character of Wolverine, in particular as seen in James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan. Flesh is healed quickly, murderous rampages are had and time periods are jumped by centuries or millennia from chapter to chapter. Also, akin to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, some chapters are written by characters outside, but affected by, the main story (“The Servant” describing herself as a comma is a masterstroke in its context, showing great emotional depth in the simplest of ways). There are also conceptual cameos from The Matrix, including a very Oracle-like character.
Miéville’s writing style certainly makes the action poetically palpable, with gems such as ‘gloomy abstraction’, ‘wet percussion’ or ‘fish flesh in formaldehyde’, and how could you not love a Frankenstein’s monster, made of thousand of years of scattered remains, described as ‘it spoke a mash of slangs dead before the continents changed’?
It’s a very violent book, but its violence is presented in a matter-of-fact, graphic novel sense, in that it’s all contextually part of the tale being told. It’s bloody and graphic, but it’s part of B’s long story. This is Neo when he’s not having an excellent adventure.
A couple of things let the book down – the first is the long passages of dialogue, mainly between the soldiers and the therapists. At least once I just wanted to get back to B and the pig, whose relationship, from many viewpoints, is fascinating, being immortals of different species. In cinematic terms, it’s like the book is three hours long while it could have been two hours, 20 minutes.
And secondly, I found the climatic Mexican standoff confusing (spoilers ahead, jump to the next paragraph to avoid); for instance, what’s the relevance/power of the jigsaw piece exactly? Also, I’m not sure of Shur’s motivations in this scene, since she changed from a peripheral to main character so late in the plot.
However, all things considered, it’s a surprisingly good read, rather like when the singer from prog metal band Tool released a range of wines that turned out to be much better than expected. As Miéville has noted regarding this book’s collaborative process, ‘Sometimes the greatest games are those you play with other people’s toys.’
Read: Book review: Cleaved, Jane Cafarella
If you’re a fan of the BRZRKR comics, you’ve probably bought (and read) this new book already. But for anyone else wanting a violent, well-written, hyper-charged dose of sci-fi/fantasy action, this is certainly worth picking up.
The Book of Elsewhere, Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
Publisher: Penguin Random House (Imprint Del Ray)
ISBN: 9781529150544
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352pp
Release date: 23 July 2024
RRP: $34.99
