The Book of Elsewhere: An interesting experiment with moments of wonder

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville

You, he thought as it drew back its right left fist, its agglomerated fistmass, on a farrago of an arm, on a stitchwork welter of a shoulder.

2024’s collaboration between acting icon Keanu Reeves and prose icon China Miéville delivers lots of thrills. The Book of Elsewhere, which follows the adventures of a nearly-unkillable warrior, is based on a character created by Reeves in his comic book, BRZRKR. The novel features an interesting protagonist and Miéville’s gleaming, playful prose, both bolted firmly to the chassis of a comic-book plot.

Unute has walked the earth in human form for 80,000 years. He has super-strength and can go into a berserker rage. He is nearly, but not completely, indestructible. He can speak any language, but this might be just because he has plenty of time to learn languages. It may not be magical. When he is killed, his remains coagulate in a pupa from which he re-emerges in fully adult form, identity and memory intact. More about that memory in a minute.

In the present day, Unute, who goes by B, is working closely with a super-secret, black ops unit of the American military. As well as being their secret weapon, he is a research subject. B knows this and welcomes it, because he wants to understand himself, and more importantly, he wants to become a regular mortal. To his knowledge, there is only one other like him, and it is a babirusa, a deer-pig. I really liked the pig, and I felt sorry for it, because its particular species ultimately died out, leaving it truly the immortal last of its kind. Plus, it’s a pig. Life is just more complicated for a pig in the modern human world. Perhaps the pig could get a sequel?

Seriously, the thing I liked best, and felt the most original to me, was the idea that non-human species had intentionally interacted with the force that created Unute, and they had god-powered weapon-protectors. I haven’t run across that idea before, and it was much more interesting than just “Dad was a god (maybe).
Anyway, there are those who have determined that Unute is not merely a weapon or an agent of death, but Death itself, and they have worked through millennia to destroy him. Those agents are coming after him now. Meanwhile, the story flips back eons to reveal his genesis and various of his adventures.

These were my favorite parts of the book. I loved the whole cocoon-reemergence of Unute, and the book’s conceit—that history is a cycle, not a line, and we aren’t the first humans to have high-technology or science, and so on. Some of the flashbacks are pre-stone-age, with a strong flavor of pulp-age stories like Conan or the more cringeworthy Kane the Immortal Warrior stories by Karl Edward Wagner. Less interesting were Unute’s modern adversaries, who seemed predictable. The final resolution was too pat.

I liked many of the secondary characters, particularly Diana, a scientist who works closely with B, Stonier, and Keever, two of the soldiers. Several of the narrators of the back-story sections were interesting and complex.

I had trouble suspending disbelief in a few areas. The first, just to get it out of the way, was Unute’s perfect memory. He is, after all, pretty close to being the offspring of a god. He can jam a human body through the wall of a tank, so why shouldn’t he have a perfect memory? Why not 80,000 years of a perfect memory? This may be a personal failing, since often I can’t remember something for more than eight minutes, but this really bothered me. Reeves and Miéville play fair with the concept, and make several characters openly doubt it, but it still bugged me.

The serious suspension-of-disbelief problem, however, came with the super-secret/black ops/high-security/need to know/work in the shadows military operation Unute is attached to. This operation has less security than my local neighborhood park. People smuggle things in and out; people have already infiltrated it right and left. Of all the characters introduced, the shorter list is the ones who weren’t compromised. While some of this was needed for the plot, it felt too contrived and a little bit lazy.

Miéville’s inventive prose carries the story, but there is a morsel in here about the human condition, and I felt deeply for both Unute and his pig-god adversary/brother. The story is not overly original, but it’s delivered in an original way. And I’m not joking—if the undying babirusa got its own book, I’d read it.