A Reluctant Übermensch

D. Harlan Wilson reviews Keanu Reeves and China Miéville’s “The Book of Elsewhere.”

By D. Harlan WilsonSeptember 2, 2024

• SF

• Comics

KEANU REEVES AND China Miéville are household names in their respective fields of cinema and literature, although they also tend to be polarizing figures whose work provokes strong feelings in viewers and readers. Whatever one may think of their artistry, there’s no denying their uniqueness, their die-hard work ethics, their careers’ longevity, or their prolific output. Reeves is part of the contemporary American cultural zeitgeist—he’s come a long way from my first memory of him in River’s Edge (1986)—whereas Miéville is an icon of New Weird fiction who moves within and between genres with a singular style and voice. Both possess underground, avant-garde, cultlike sensibilities, yet both have achieved massive success: Miéville has won nearly every major award in the speculative fiction world (including the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards), and Reeves—well, if you don’t know what he’s been up to for the last few decades, you’re probably not reading this review.

In their new collaboration The Book of Elsewhere, Reeves moves into Miéville’s imaginative territory, but this isn’t his first foray into speculative literature. The novel is a self-contained offshoot of a previous comic book series called BRZRKR (2021–23) that Reeves co-wrote with Matt Kindt, who is best known for another comic series, MIND MGMT (2012–15). Issues of BRZRKR have been collected into three volumes and the recent spin-off Bloodlines (2024). The comic provides additional context and serves as an extended annotation or supplement to the novel, which is occasionally—and constructively, I’d say—cryptic, reflecting the cryptic nature of the protagonist. On the whole, Elsewhere has received mostly positive reviews, which is completely understandable since the novel is gripping, stylish, smart, and provocative. It’s also a whirlwind of intertextuality that draws together mythology, psychology, philosophy, and speculative fiction and film.

Reeves and Miéville appeared on talk shows and conducted several interviews to promote Elsewhere and discuss their collaboration. In an interview for The Guardian, Reeves admitted that he “didn’t want to write the book. I wanted another creator to take that journey. So, ultimately, China has written the novel.” Reeves may have been more of a consultant, then, especially regarding characters. “The germ of the idea,” he said, “was just a character who could punch through chests and rip arms off. I wanted to do a pulpy, hyper-violent action idea. […] Then it just started to bloom in my imagination.”

Inviting Miéville to write the novel makes sense: he is a linguistic technician who makes words do things most authors cannot. The prose in The Book of Elsewhere is more accessible than the densely baroque style that distinguishes Miéville’s other novels—such as Perdido Street Station (2000) and Embassytown (2011)—but his lyricism is identifiable from beginning to end (e.g., a body falls with “the sodden percussion of meat on the floor,” somebody sees “the motion of innards, like fish troubled by light,” and so on).

The protagonist, an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior variably called Unute or “B,” seems tailor-made for the type of antihero Reeves loves to play, channeling essences of Constantine, Neo, John Wick, and Johnny Mnemonic. It also seems very likely that Reeves will get his chance to portray B on the silver screen: BRZRKR is in development for a Netflix movie. During an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America, Reeves said he encouraged concept artist Rafael Grampa to make the character look like him with an eye to starring in an adaptation.

The novel itself opens with “a room, full of violence to come,” which sets the tone for the pulpy, ultraviolent ethos of the narrative. We are introduced to a special-ops task force that includes B, short for “berserker,” like the fabled medieval Vikings referenced in the title BRZRKR (sans feminine vowels, all alpha-masculine consonants), the dominant intertext that establishes his character. In Norse and Germanic folklore, berserkers were known for their ruthlessness in battle and their ability to snap into killing fugues that would enable them to wreak preternatural havoc. B possesses this very talent; the problem, however, is that he loses control whenever he sees red, jeopardizing everybody’s life within his immediate vicinity. In the prologue, he kills a fellow soldier, but it’s not the first time he’s been the catalyst for a friendly-fire event. He has been going on blind-rage murder sprees his whole life, for generations and generations, prompting one primitive community after another to worship him like a god or fear him like a devil (given his great age, most of his life experience has been with prehistoric cultures). This isn’t to say he hasn’t been murdered himself: he has died too many times to count. But whenever he dies, he is reborn from the womb of an egg spontaneously constructed from his own residual gore.

The main plotline is straight out of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): B is on a journey to discover his origins and identity—i.e., he is in search of enlightenment. His quest emulates the search undergone by Siddhartha Gautama, a wandering ascetic and the founder of Buddhism, whom Reeves played in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1993 film Little Buddha. B is the antithesis of the pacifist Siddhartha, but he craves peace, and like another comic book hero whose body regenerates, Marvel’s Wolverine, he is weary of immortality. Essentially, he’s a vampire without fangs—and there’s an additional intertext, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). We can similarly align him with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), invoked on numerous occasions; for example, the avuncular veteran Keever, possibly a stand-in for “Keanu Reeves,” calls him “Franken-B.” In addition, B’s depiction points to many other works of literature (Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus [1976]), film (Highlander [1986]), comics (Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta [1982–89]), philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo [1908]), psychology (Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams [1899]), and cultural theory (Georges Bataille’s The Tears of Eros [1961]). Reeves and Miéville have constructed B to be as much a force of (unnatural) nature as he is an intertextual vortex that, above all, metafictionally alludes to his patchwork body, which is constantly piecing itself back together, and his overloaded mind, a vast receptacle of “perfect” memories accrued over tens of thousands of years.

The structure of the novel is also a patchwork, with shifting perspectives and the use of assorted fonts to denote different time periods and voices. Occasionally, syntax is rendered in fragments, usually to represent B’s stream-of-consciousness mentation under duress, and while there are moments when I found myself wanting more exposition, the novel largely unfolds with clarity of purpose and is effectively labyrinthine, embedding multiple flashbacks to and from B’s past that build his character. For instance, in the chapter called “Tooth,” B briefly recounts the history of his relationship with a berserker deer-pig or babirusa “that echoed his own life” and is infinitely reborn postmortem. “[M]ore dog than pig,” the babirusa is an important character: it shadows B on his journey of self-discovery, but it hates him and regularly tries to kill him (B euthanized its mother because the pig “hurt her coming out” during birth).

Like B, the babirusa arouses veneration and dread in people over the span of millennia. It’s not, however, a killing machine on par with B, who is a magnet for nicknames that mythologize his innately homicidal mode de vie (e.g., “son of death,” “manifestation of entropy,” “avatar of war”). Such nicknames are often created by emergent cults and religions like the “Unutarians,” who perceive him as a Jesus figure. In a chapter narrated by B’s forsaken wife Immerfrau, we learn that “[t]o the blasphemous tenet that the Saved, being Saved, were not bound by the Ten Commandments, those known as Unutarians added the doctrine that a new Christ walked among us.” Immerfrau refers to him as “the lightning son” vis-à-vis the legend that storm clouds gave birth to him. B/Unute-inspired movements extend to the “impossible new science” of Unutology, a “field that shaded from morphology to speculative biology to quantum physics to fulminology, thence to mythography and ontology, sometimes even fucking theology.” As an interdisciplinary Übermensch made flesh, B piques the interest of a wide range of belief systems throughout time. Not surprisingly, many contemporary Unutologists want to harness and weaponize whatever makes him tick in order to create an army of super soldiers, one of the novel’s many pulp-SF tropes.

But he is a reluctant Übermensch. Not so much in a Nietzschean sense—despite wisdom and intelligence, he is still a warrior at heart, and while he struggles with moral dilemmas and becomes more and more remorseful for his actions, his body won’t let him stop. As a confidante explains to him near the end of the novel, “You may not like morals-of-the-story but it sounds like your body does. It’s your body that’s doing this, after all. When it needs to end a chapter.” Whenever B dies, in other words, his body concludes a chapter in the ostensibly endless book of his life, a bona fide “elsewhereness” in terms of his alterity as a superhuman and his terminal peregrination from one place and time to another. The “book of elsewhere” of the novel’s title thus references B himself as well as a journal (the book-within-the-book) that he keeps to map his travels and to better understand the circle of death that his book/body enacts. Mysteriously, when he comes back to life, sometimes it’s in a different spot from where he died. He eventually realizes that “ris[ing] elsewhere” has to do with an “egg tooth” that his body fails to reabsorb, prompting “whatever it is I am” to drift “to a new safe place.” This is the primary revelation that B (and readers) are granted. He doesn’t figure out why he is the way he is or where he really came from. “It turns out that figuring things out just pushes things back a step,” he deduces.

B has a Wolverine complex: he doesn’t want to die, but he wants to be able to die, to purge himself of “the banality of endlessness,” and he’s trapped between these two antithetical desires, a duality that manifests in his emotional spectrum. Elsewhere foregrounds other dualities that signal this condition and are connected to overlying themes of good and evil, yin and yang, dark and light, all of which B’s character brings into play. For example, two Unutologists, Diana and Caldwell, are cut from the same scientific cloth but have diametrically opposed objectives: one is driven by altruistic motives whereas the other is a proverbial mad scientist who wants to siphon B’s “purest energies.” There’s also B’s foil, Alam, who hunts and stands in contrast to him as a “vector” of life, possessing regenerative powers that he hopes will negate his enemy’s “vector of death.”

It has become an unspoken industry rule among big publishers that novelists should compose books in such a way that they easily can be turned into screenplays and adapted into movies. Reeves and Miéville have accomplished something special along those lines. There is a palpable cinematic quality to The Book of Elsewhere, and I can see clearly how the story could be broken into three acts with narrative arcs all working together toward a crowd-pleasing climax. At the same time, the irreal, fragmented structure of the novel and the strength of its picturesque prose (at once accessible and lyrical) make it seem more like a venture into indie or small-press publishing—the last bastion, in my view, of genuinely innovative and experimental literature. I don’t know if the co-authors intended to straddle this divide, but they have pulled it off in spades, producing what few have done before them: a work of high literary pulp science fiction and fantasy.