The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, July 23, 2024). Jacket design by Drusilla Adeline

Can someone who has been alive for 80,000 years find wonder and meaning in every day life? Would such an immortal still be capable of surprise, still uncertain about his own motivations, still unable to come to grips with the meaning of it all? After experiencing centuries upon centuries of the death of others, and frequently inflicting those deaths, do you become oblivious to the fate of mortal souls as just so many anthill denizens?

Is there anyone else out there like you? And why are you the way you are? Would the wish for mortality indicate a Freudian death wish, or instead a yearning to experience the existential perils and the perplexities of being that paradoxically imbue significance?

These are the intertwined questions posed by The Book of Elsewhere, a tie-in novel by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville based on BRZRKR, a 12-issue comic book (graphic novel?) co-written by Reeves. The title refers to when the protagonist suffers episodes of uncontrollable violence and goes “berserk” (get it?), although “suffer” is perhaps better applied to those in the line of fire of his rage.

If you haven’t been reading up on this seemingly odd collaboration, you might be surprised not only by the pairing, but also that China Miéville would “stoop” to write a tie-in novel.

For one thing, let’s keep in mind that while “tie-in novel” is considered slumming in some quarters, the genres with which we are concerned with here at Black Gate even today are often tarnished as inferiors, despite the dystopian and science fictional du jour settings among literary writers.

It also happens that Miéville celebrates genre pulp themes, from science fiction and fantasy to detective mysteries to comic books to gross-out horror to action figures to anything else literary snobs may still frown upon; no surprise that after a long period of absence from fiction he embraces writing a comic book novelization.  (To get more into “the weeds” of Miéville’s world view, take a trip down the memory hole to read this interview I did with him at the start of his novelling, a word I just invented, career.)

While Reeves gets top billing, and perhaps had the good sense of not using the demeaning and often inaccurate “with” preposition for his co-author,  Miéville does the heavy lifting here. The concept is Reeves, the execution Miéville’s. The writer is Miéville with Reeves as editor, or to borrow a term from his movie acting career, the executive producer.

(Oddly, though I’ve never read the comic series, I started to visualize scenes while reading the novel as if they were comic book panels. I don’t know if Miéville was actually reaching for that sort of thing in his prose, or was just something  going on in my synapses.)

The Book of Elsewhere, UK edition (Del Rey, July 23, 2024)

Our immortal hero, variously called “B,” short for his characteristic berserker rages, or Unute, for no reason I can discern other than it sounds like a name from a primitive tribe dating back to around the dawn of homo sapiens, is a bit worn out, as you might expect to happen to a guy who lives and dies and is repeatedly reborn from a kind of gooey egg over a course of eons. (In the comic book, Unute looks a lot like Reeves; there’s a planned Netflix live action version, which presumably will star guess who?)

Over the course of his deathless treks he has tried to find another of his kind; so far the only other immortal is, of all things, a babirusa, a breed of pig, though there are hints of others. (If you’re perplexed by the notion of an eternal pig, note that in a variety of traditions a pig is symbolic of fertility, creation, and new beginnings. Kinda makes ironical sense.)

B has agreed to let a super secret (aren’t they always) Special Ops team study him in return for helping him find the secret to become perishable (“I don’t want to die. What I want is mortality, and that’s not the same thing.”).  Then a mission goes awry thanks to an unexpected attack from the babirusa, for reasons B and readers are left to ponder (possibly only immortals can try to end their own respective banes of perpetual existence?)  The husband of one of the soldiers killed is recommended to a self-help group to deal with his grief. But the self-help group isn’t what it seems. And the plot unfurls.

This, however, is only the framing story. There are a number of flashbacks to explain, if that’s the right word, B’s origin story and his frustrating search for companionship down the ages. And there’s the titular Book Of Elsewhere, a sort of notebook kept over the centuries  by B entrusted to a Polish Jew orphaned by a Nazi bombing raid, with the admonition,

You seem to me to be a man who wants a journey that leads somewhere other than to where it began. I suppose there’s no reason why it has to be me who brings the book back to the last departure point.

Which I think is the underlying message of the book about the book about an uncaring world’s violent history,

There are also guest appearances by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, he of the whole Thanatos theory as well as purportedly remarking, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Not in this book though. A cigar is never a cigar. That’s the fun, and likely the confusion, of The Book of Elsewhere. Probably not the book that I would pick to introduce anyone to Miéville. But one that’s going to make for quite a movie.

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David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. His most recent was a review of The Cemetery of Untold Stories.