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Writer's picturemikeofthepalace

“The Book of Elsewhere” by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

This book was fun. I didn’t understand it - I didn’t expect too, really, knowing China Miéville - but I enjoyed it all the same.


Obviously the big attention-getter here is Keanu Reeves. In most cases I would think it was a gimmick, but Reeves and Miéville both (from everything I’ve heard) have too much artistic integrity to do that sort of thing, and both have enough cachet they don’t really need to anyway. If you’d told me a year ago I’d be reading a book about an immortal warrior and the immortal pig who hates him personally co-written by Ted/Neo/John Wick, I’d have been skeptical. But it works.


The main character here is Unute, also known as B. He’s 80,000 years old, more or less. He can be killed, if enough damage is done - he heals very effectively, so it takes a lot - but his bits and pieces will always congeal into an egg and he’ll reemerge none the worse for wear. When sufficiently stressed/hurt, he enters a berserk state and kills … pretty much everything. He’s serving as part of an elite commando team, for entirely his own reasons. The job of the rest of the commandos is to provide support and then get the hell out of the way when Unute’s eyes start glowing blue. The brass pretends to give him orders, and he pretends to follow them, with the unspoken agreement that they won’t ever try to order him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Meanwhile, there’s a team of scientists studying Unute, trying to figure out exactly what/how he is, precisely. Unute doesn’t mind; they’re not the first, and won’t be the last.


Early on in the book, after some very weird stuff goes on during a mission, Unute shows up at the lab with the corpse of a pig, of all things. To be more precise, it’s a Babirusa, an Indonesian deer-pig. It, he tells the team, is the only other thing he’s ever met that has the same kind of immortality as Unute, and is nearly as old as Unute himself. No matter where he goes, anywhere in the world, the pig finds him eventually. The pig carcass forms its egg, hatches out of it, and immediately tries to kill Unute - as it always does, he says.


As I said at the top of this review, I didn’t really understand this book. I wasn’t really expecting to - I expect anything Miéville is part of to be New Weird, and New Weird is always, well, weird. But I enjoyed it quite a lot all the same. The book is a mix of perspectives - different members of the team that works with Unute; Unute himself; flashback sections to people Unute encountered over the course of his long, long life. These interludes were probably my favorite part. I’d quite happily read an entire anthology following Unute down the millenia.


There is, I understand, a related graphic novel co-written by Reeves called BRZRKR. I wasn’t aware of this before I read the book, but I’m very curious to check it out.


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