Keanu Reeves wrote a book. Well, sort of. Last month, the actor-turned-bass player-turned-comic book writer published his first novel, The Book of Elsewhere, in collaboration with the British author China Miéville. The unlikely pair collaborated on the adaptation of Reeves's commercially successful BRZRKR comic series in novel form. Reeves's most important contributions to the project were the narrative scaffolding and a significant enough Miéville fandom to feel comfortable giving him the rock and letting him cook, serving as a point guard on the basketball court of ideas. Though Reeves's name appears first on the cover, Miéville wrote the whole thing.
It may seem like an unexpected move for one of the world's biggest movie stars to release a doorstopper fantasy epic, but for those of us who've spent more than a decade awaiting Miéville's next doorstopper fantasy epic, the bigger surprise was how much of a departure this marked for the writer. He hasn't collaborated on something this significant, with anyone, let alone one of the stars of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It is, I think obviously, the first piece of writing that's gotten Miéville onto Good Morning America. Miéville hadn't published a novel since Railsea came out in 2012 (two years before the first John Wick movie), spending the intervening years founding a radical journal of politics and culture, publishing a book about the Russian Revolution with Verso, and publishing a new introduction to the Communist Manifesto with Haymarket.
Mostly I wondered: How much license was Miéville going to have to get weird? Would the collaborative and adaptive nature of the novel round off the more idiosyncratic corners of Miéville's ambitious syntax and odd obsessions in order to hunt a mainstream audience? Respectively: a ton, and no. Of course Elsewhere stands apart from other Miéville works. They all stand apart from each other. An endorsement of the novel's quality is that critics who clearly expected a more straightforward comic book adaptation wound up expressing an impish frustration that the book was not composed of sentences like, "She picked up the sword. She laughed, because it was time to use the sword. For swordfighting." Elsewhere is the full-bore Miéville experience, undiluted—and I would even argue enhanced—by the conditions of its creation.
Miéville is often concerned with exploring the limits of human comprehension—playing with concepts that border on the unthinkable—and you can see this in his obsession with vastness. Whether it's the scale of oceans in The Scar, or of language in Embassytown, or of art in The Last Days of New Paris, there is always something that induces a kind of vertigo in the reader. It's also apparent in what you might, in a move he would surely encourage, describe as his appreciation for dialectical thinking, or a kind of spooky duality: the introduction of two seemingly mutually exclusive things that are, upon reflection, actually interdependent.
The vastness he and Reeves explore in their new work is temporal, and the duality is life and death. Elsewhere centers on B, or Unute, an 80,000-year-old immortal with a perfect memory. He is helping a mega-secret wing of the U.S. military do their dirty work in exchange for access to their bleeding-edge research in hopes of someday granting him the one thing he's never experienced: mortality. Which isn't to say B wants to die, just that he would like, for the first time, to meaningfully live. B often remarks that his life is devoid of surprise, and it's charming that a figure alternately worshipped as a god by some factions throughout history, conceived of as corporeal death by others, and locked in an eternal struggle with a babirusa is still seeking to enspicen his life. Half-god children who witnessed the fall of Atlantis and have been around since the Pleistocene: They're just like us!
"If you come in wanting horrible violence and a helicopter chase, you’re going to get it," Miéville told Wired in June. "Because it would be cheating to not give you that in a BRZRKR novel." B is the child of a human lady and either the god of lightning or the force of lightning itself, the result of a meteorologically ambitious, hallucinogen-fueled union. The specifics don't matter, neither to B nor the narrative, except that he is overcome at times by a battle fugue where his eyes go blue and he kills everything around him, friend or foe. The narrative truly kicks into gear when a soldier from B's unit, whose death is later implied to have been B's own doing, spasms back to life.
Elsewhere's multifarious syntactical rhythms and adversarial diction will be familiar to anyone who's enjoyed Miéville's previous novels; that first trip to the dictionary to look up "sastrugi" and "Urschleim" will feel like driving to the airport to pick up a beloved family member. Also on the list of notable words I tracked: apotropaic, lubricious, khesheph. Words notable for different reasons include "Crossfit" and "Solange Knowles." If the U.S. military setting feels uncomfortably conventional, meeting the unit's Head of Belief Systems and Ancient Technology Migration will be a welcome balm. The word Miéville uses for B's berserk mode is "riastrid." It will not surprise you to learn that he cribs this one from the seventh-century Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Miéville, an unabashed language pervert, takes clear glee in the polyglottal possibility of a character who knows more dead languages than there are living ones, all of which he knows too.
Language is another one of those trademark Miéville fixations. What of the others? As is characteristic in his fiction, the story moves simultaneously backwards and forwards, with oblique squabbling between rival sects the frame for larger-order struggles of philosophy and religion. Tension mounts with the discovery of arcana, and is resolved in their interpretation, rather than the mechanics of something as prosaic as a final physical confrontation. His novels are not all mysteries per se, but none of them are what they say they are. In Elsewhere's case, even the stark binary of life and death gives way under Miéville's examination into something more cosmic. The only way B can truly live, he posits, is with the apprehension of his own death. From that starting point, which is as far as the comics go, Miéville somehow builds something an order of magnitude more lofty.
If this sounds, well, vaguely Freudian, boy do I have news for you. Herr Doktor is a POV character on Page 8, and he gets something like the last word in Elsewhere. As Hannah Zeavin noted in Wired, one could read the novel as a "lost case study." (Zeavin wasn't aware of what exactly Miéville was working on when she started profiling him, and it turns out the founder of Parapraxis, a "psychoanalytically oriented supplement to the existing venues of radical critique and historical materialism," was eerily suited for the job.) The B in the comics has a therapist, a military psychoanalyst is a significant character in Elsewhere, and even the Freud bit emerges from an easter egg in the original text (to Reeves's credit, so does "Head of Belief Systems and Ancient Technology Migration.") The fictional Freud writes that B helped spur forward his theory of the death drive, bringing "the first moment of that two-pronged Damascene shock that shattered all my paradigms" by forcing the doctor to reckon with the psychic damage of 80,000 years spent both chasing and dealing death.
Perhaps the book's single most significant departure from its predecessors is its relative disinterest in politics. This, to me, seems less the result of a diktat from Reeves and more a covalency between the source material and the story Miéville wants to tell. How much would politics qua politics actually matter to someone who's seen so many civilizations rise and fall?
Not a ton, though that is not to say this book is totally devoid of any political imagination. The guy who spent a decade writing books about communism was not going to let an immortal slip through the 19th century without having him meet Karl Marx and observe that he was funnier than he gets credit for. As much as any Miéville reader enjoys the experience of him essentially dramatizing meeting notes, that wouldn't necessarily be coherent with the rules of the adaptation.
Instead, Miéville focuses on sanding the texture of eternity with great care, most effectively in the series of second-person chapters that stipple the present-day story. "Once you spent three lifetimes sitting without moving on a stone chair halfway up a mountain, to see what would happen. Nothing happened." That sort of thing. In my favorite sentence in Elsewhere, a 500-ish-word epic (on page 240, for reference), B derails an important ancient quest to establish a soothsaying business and "gull the credulous" until he takes up with a beautiful sub-vizier and spends an entire lifetime with them before getting on his way. He is killed four times en route to his destination, and the journey ends with him being tortured for what could be weeks or centuries. There is no way for him to mark the time and little functional difference. The heft of all that past stacks up, and Miéville deftly draws out the tension between so much of B's life feeling fundamentally insignificant and the present-day story ultimately mattering.
This is the unthinkable vastness that Miéville thinks his way through in Elsewhere, and as is typically the case with his novels, it gets extremely weird. It's a comic book story, though the stakes are more mystical than visceral; it's a sci-fi story, though its subject is less the heights of human technological achievement than the depths of the human brain.
A dozen years is a long time to have waited for more full-length Miéville fiction, as great as October was, and The Book of Elsewhere scratches that familiar itch. Reading the book felt like rekindling a dormant friendship. He's so back, and when his self-professed "white whale" drops next year, he will be somehow even more back.
