The Book of Elsewhere is the first new work of fiction by China Miéville since 2016. (In the interim, he published nonfiction books on the Communist Manifesto and on the Russian Revolution). The book is a coilaboration between Miéville and the actor Keanu Reeves. The main character, known as Unute or B, and the basic contours of his world, were originally developed by Reeves for a comic book, or graphic novel, called BRZRKR; its various installments have been co-written by Reeves and a number of comic book authors. The novel massively expands the franchise; and a feature film and an anime series are in development.
Unute is a warrior, born 80,000 years ago, and apparently immortal. He has superhuman strength, and the power to go into a berserker fugue state where he pretty much kills everyone around him. His body recovers quickly from injuries that would be mortal to anyone else; and when he is injured badly enough to actually die, he soon regenerates, breaking out of an egg in full adult form. He is also blessed, or cursed, with the complete memory of all his experiences over thousands of years; though he is not conscious during, and therefore does not later remember, the short periods during which he regenerates in the egg.
All this is recounted, in outline, in the original graphic novel. (There are three volumes of BRZRKR written by Reeves in collaboration with Matt Kindt, which together form one continuous narrative; two additional stories, written by Reeves with Steve Skroce and Mattson Tomlin respectively, provide additional incidents in Unute’s career. In all these cases, I am only listing the writers; a number of visual artists collaborate as well).
The Book of Elsewhere, with its considerable length, allows for a great expansion of things that were only sketched briefly in the graphic novels. We mostly see Unute in the present moment. He is working, uneasily, as part of a special unit of the American (apparently) secret intelligence forces. They send him (together with a crack team of soldiers) to various hot spots around the world, in order to commit assassinations or wipe out groups of (supposed) “terrorists.” Unute doesn’t seem to have any particular committment to American hegemony, and the military and intelligence authorities cannot really order him to do anything that he doesn’t want to do. But he goes along with their requests in return for having them study him so he can learn more about himself. In particular, Unute is tired of being immortal; he doesn’t want to die, but he wants to be able to die.
The writing is vivid and intense, as we would expect from Miéville. There is a lot of action, both in the present and in a number of flashbacks to Unute’s past, and to stories of individuals whom he encountered briefly over the course of the ages he has been around. There is no scientific agreement about just when Homo sapiens developed a full language, and all of the capabilities we have today; but 80,000 years ago is a reasonable figure. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens has existed for something like 150,000 years, but evidence of cultural achievement is more recent. On the other hand, our ancestors interbred with closely related species (the Neanderthals and the Denisovians) between 50,000 and 20,000 years ago. So we can assume that Unute’s lifespan pretty much coincides with the history of human “species being” (to use Marx’s term).
There are a lot of (pleasurable) digressions and side developments, but the novel is fundamentally concerned with the (philosophical) meaning and nature of Unute, or of the very fact that he exists. He is continually looking for any others who are like him, or who are similarly immortal because they exist in some sort of binary/dialectical opposition to him, but this quest is frequently disappointed. In particular, his murderous abilities do not exist in the abstract, apart from any historical contexts and situations; though they are continually being enacted within such contexts and situations, of which working for American power is only the most recent. Whatever Unute may be, he is emphatically not an ahistorical principle of evil or tyranny or fascism.
Unute does, however, turn out to have doubles and/or enemies in certain metaphysical contexts. His nemesis for much of the novel is a large pig, specifically a Babirusa, which seems to have the same powers as he does: it cannot die, or at least it regenerates whenever it is killed. This Babirusa has hunted, and sought to kill, Unute for most of his 80,000 years of existence. In addition, if Unute is a force of Death, as he often considers himself to be, then he is unavoidably in opposition to a force of Life, which itself may be eternally present, or at least eternally reincarnated, in the same way that he is. Unute does have an enemy of this sort. But the enmity of this opponent, and the enmity of the pig as well, change over the course of the novel; and seem in the last analysis only to constitute false oppositions. In a more fully dialectical sense, both Unute and his uncanny doubles seem to be agents of Change, and in this respect they are more similar than they are different, and they are alike opposed to the entropic decline of a universe fated to end in a heat death (as the Victorians mostly believed, and as some physicists today still maintain). I fear I am saying too much, and perhaps giving away spoilers, even to go this far. The theme is worked out in much more careful detail over the course of the novel, and especially in its final sections. I will just say, first, that in the course of his career, although Keanu Reeves has occasionally played bad guys, he doesn’t usually do this; he seems to prefer that, if he is not in a heroic role, then he is at least in an ambiguous one that they audience can identify with in spite of various unpleasant aspects (e.g. John Wick). And in the second place, I will note that China Miéville has played with similar ideas in earlier novels, going all the way back to Isaac’s crisis engine in Perdido Street Station, which is able to mobilize the potentiality for change in any given situation.
I will stop here. In any case, The Book of Elsewhere is a rich book, worthy of both its creators.