Avatar of war: The Book of Elsewhere (2024) by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

"Only he, among all who walk the Earth, has a story worth writing down."

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville - a collaboration that at first seems strange, then makes perfect sense, and then seems strange all over again. The star of John Wick and the writer of Perdido Street Station worked together to produce The Book of Elsewhere (2024), which Miéville described as “a story of ancient powers, modern war, and one person’s quest to find mortality and purpose.”

This collaboration was a rather unequal one. The novel is a spinoff from Reeves’ comics series BRZRKR (2021 - 2023), and he is credited with its concept; but the novel was written by Miéville. Both the comics and this novel focus on Unute or “B”, an immortal warrior with 80,000 years of bloodshed behind him, now working with a shadowy US government agency. Compared to the comics, The Book of Elsewhere has a much more enigmatic, philosophical approach in keeping with Miéville’s style. 

This is a genre-bending novel of the New Weird, fusing contemporary black ops culture with secret histories of the deep past, parascience, and philosophical speculation.

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The forever warrior

In the vicinity of Tacoma, Washington, a covert military group known only as the Unit maintains a secret base. The organisation is built around Unute, or “B”, an immortal warrior who has lived for 80,000 years. When he chooses to, B accompanies Unit troops on black operations around the world. Meanwhile, the group’s scientists study him, attempting to unlock the secret of his mysterious, deathless nature. For his part, B hopes that the science team will be able to find a way to give him the gift of mortality.

When one of the Unit’s soldiers briefly returns to life after being killed during an operation, and B’s immortal animal counterpart - an undying babirusa, or deer-pig - returns after a long absence, the organisation is thrown into uncertainty. Trying to explain these events, B reaches deep into his perfect recall of the deep past, to long-ago encounters with another bizarre entity with a fate which may be linked to his own.

Welcome to wherever you are

The New York Times called the novel a “pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller”. The publishers must have leapt at the chance to use this as a blurb quote, as it so neatly aligns with the popular John Wick films which fit that description perfectly and which have revitalised Reeves’ screen career since 2014. As a description of The Book of Elsewhere, though, it is highly misleading. 

This is very much a China Miéville novel, which is to say that it is thoroughly strange, oblique, and philosophical. While B’s formidable combat abilities and towering bodycount are frequently alluded to, they are never the focus of the novel. Instead, it is his immortal nature which predominates. B longs not to die, but to be able to die. The mystery of his deathlessness consumes B, his allies in the Unit, and his enemies. He both magnetises and repels everyone who comes into contact with him, and his fundamental oddness is Miéville’s guiding light.

The Book of Elsewhere is very much a novel in the tradition of the so-called New Weird, the loose movement with which Miéville is closely associated. It sometimes recalls other authors in this subgenre - in particular the Unit recalls Southern Reach, the similarly enigmatic United States agency in Jeff VanderMeer’s series which began with Annihilation (2014). Like those novels, The Book of Elsewhere has a strangely placeless, vague feel in which very few settings are identified - it could have been called “The Book of Nowhere”.

Miéville includes some charmingly strange elements. One is the babirusa which is afflicted by the same curse of immortality as B, and which holds a ceaseless, millennia-long grudge against him. Another is the fact that when B seemingly “dies”, and his body is destroyed, he is swiftly reincarnated from a mansize fleshy egg, sometimes at a great distance from the apparently fatal incident. It is B’s written record of these occasions which gives the novel its title. 

Interviews with the immortal

The novel’s style and structure are as unusual as its events. Miéville deploys three narrative modes, one each in the first, second, and third person. The main narrative is told in the third person and focuses on B and the Unit in the present day. A handful of shorter sections are written in the second person; these are addressed to B and relate to particular actions in his long life. Several longer sections are written in the first person. Each of these - including a frame narrative written by "The Doctor", implied to be Sigmund Freud - is told from the perspective of a person who encountered B at some point in history. 

It is these first-person sections which are the strongest parts of The Book of Elsewhere. Each one resembles a fairly self-contained short story, and while most do little to advance the novel’s plot, they are quite satisfying tales in their own right. “The Wife’s Story”, for example, recalls Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire (1976), as a young woman has her life changed forever by her encounter with B. She marries him, and is swept away into new experiences of the world - but she is simultaneously drawn to and appalled by him. Of course unlike Rice’s vampire Lestat, B cannot share his dubious gift of immortality.

It is clear that in part, The Book of Elsewhere is a work of brand extension for Reeves’ BRSRKR concept, which is sure to be expanded further into a screen version. Miéville clearly entered into this arrangement with his eyes open, though. While this novel is unlikely to be thought of by many as among the writer’s best work, it is absolutely the kind of material that only Miéville could or would write. For both better and worse, The Book of Elsewhere takes Reeves’ pulpy concept and fashions it into something genuinely enigmatic and strange.