HUGE DISCLAIMER: if you believe that revealing plot elements can spoil your reading process, please read the book first and come back afterwards. This will still be here.

So this happened: Keanu Reeves and China Miéville (who hadn’t published any fiction since 2016, when he gave us the novellas The Last Days of New Paris and This Census-Taker) have collaborated on a novel. The Book of Elsewhere is set in the world of Reeves’s comic book series BRZRKR, which revolves around B (army/research name) or Unute (the name his mother gave him), an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior with superhuman strength who wants to become mortal. (He can die, he can even be killed, but he always comes back.) In the comic books, B/Unute is depicted by various graphic artists in turn, in everyone’s characteristic style, but almost always resembling his creator—and seemingly inspired by the two internet memes “Sad Keanu” (showing Keanu Reeves in what is now B’s signature pose: sitting head down with his elbows resting on his knees) and “Immortal Keanu Reeves” (which claims that in addition to Reeves supposedly never aging, there are portraits of him going back at least to medieval times).

Reeves admits that this particular adaptation is Miéville’s baby: “I didn’t want to write the book. I wanted another creator to take that journey. So, ultimately, China has written the novel. It’s not, like, we could look at page eight and say, ‘Oh, I wrote this section.’ I didn’t write any of the novel.’” Miéville puts it more graciously, stating that being contacted about writing this book was an invitation for him to play with Reeves’s toys. The result, The Book of Elsewhere, is truly collaborative, though, because you can see how respectfully and how graciously both contributors treat each other’s work.

Reeves only asked two things of Miéville: that B/Unute would still be the main protagonist, and that he’d still want to attain mortality. In return for this generosity, Miéville delivered a novel that, while being far from a straightforward adaptation of the comic books, demonstrates all of his core values. He retains the central characters from the comic books (the warrior B, the scientist Diana, the soldier Keever, program director and secret cult leader Caldwell) and/but—and and but, andbut (p. 245 etc.)—adding a plethora of details and, yes, stories (you’ll see) that serve to flesh out the world and characters and provide more depth and diversity. Miéville names every soldier. He gives everyone a voice.

Info for the uninitiated: B works for and with an American black-ops army squad and allows their scientists to study him—his biology as well as his psyche—so they will share their results with him in return. Compared to BRZRKR, Elsewhere focusses more on the research angle—on B’s search for his own humanity and less on the comic-book’s violence—but fans of BRZRKR won’t be disappointed: if you are reading this for some serious splatter and a helicopter chase, you will get all of this and more. Equally, fans who have been waiting for Miéville to write more fiction won’t be disappointed. This is both a BRZRKR book and a Miéville book.

How so? Well, before we take a look at the plot, the style, and the themes, we might notice two things that inform all these: (1) the dedication (“To our mothers—for life, for storytelling … for love”); and (2) the epigraph, three lines from Rilke’s poem “Silent friend of many distances, feel” (“Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle”), which is also printed on the last page of BRZRKR Vol. 3 and thus not only sets the atmosphere but also serves to connect the graphic and the prose novels:

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
- Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

B’s story, as rendered by Miéville, also moves like water (and references water at various points). The story of B’s journey is interspersed with bits of memory, like in the comic books. Additionally, the narrative is partially made up of other characters’ stories about B, about their encounters, or their lives with B, switching from third-person to first-person to second-person as required; hopping between historical eras, countries, cultures, and religions; exploring gender and sexuality, race and class; asking questions about humanity that cannot easily be answered; and, above all, providing an abundance of perspectives on B and whether and/or to what extent he is human. All this, of course, adds to B’s own brooding introspection. But everyone gets a voice, including the literally voiceless (spoiler/no spoiler).

This, of course, is where the “storytelling” theme from the dedication comes in. Human beings are storytellers. Strictly speaking, from a wide and literally universal position, everything we know and propagate, including history and science, is fiction: stories that we tell ourselves and each other in an attempt to impose structure on our perceptions of a seemingly random universe; to give meaning to events, to our lives; to pretend that we understand the world around us and the things that are happening to us. Weird Fiction, the SFF subgenre that Miéville identifies his work with, has always emphasised that this notion is human folly, and that the reality behind it is cosmic horror: our own infinite smallness, randomness, and meaninglessness.

B seems to agree while also understanding this yearning for meaning:

You long ago identified in yourself, no matter what evidence you amass that the thought is folly, a sense of toldness. That certain things must be, to make the shape of life a story. You have seen such hankering in most of the people you’ve known. It is because you share that dangerous inclination that you hesitate to say you are not human. It is wrong many more times than it is right. (pp. 31-32)

B’s origin story is faithfully taken from the comic books: how, some 80,000 years ago, his parents’ settlement was regularly raided by neighbouring tribes; how his mother, unable to watch this endless history of violence, concocted a magic potion and prayed to a higher power for a divine weapon to save her people; how she was visited by a mythical bolt of blue lightning and subsequently gave birth to a supernatural boy whom she named Unute, meaning “tool,” meaning “weapon.” In Elsewhere, B remembers his mother telling this story to him as a boy, sometimes in word, sometimes in song:

So my father is not my father? you said. Hush, silly, she said. Your father is your father, he’s your dayfather, and the blue lightning is your nightfather. (p. 29)

Not only here, but throughout the book, Miéville respects the story andbut adds more depth, more detail, and more diversity, including the entwined politics of race, class, and gender. B himself is described as a tall and solid man, and had those he passed observed him, most would have considered him white (p. 15). It’s nuances like this that make the reader focus more, maybe rethink their own perception of the world and the people around them. (And, indeed, how many of you have always implicitly, maybe unconsciously, considered B’s model, Keanu Reeves, white? He isn’t.)

Soldiers always have identities, and there are cues that all the squads and teams of scientists are a diverse mix of race, class, gender, yet there is never a direct mention of skin colour or a gratuitous description of body type or body parts. Stereotypes are subtly eroded to such an extent that when a voice on the phone identifies the caller as “Lieutenant Carstairs from the San Antonio Police,” you are surprised that the officer turns out to be a man (p. 158). Similarly, Miéville gives us hints that, in this version of BRZRKR, Caldwell is Hawaiian, when he makes the scientist exaggerate his accent and mention a luau, thus stressing a technique of self-protection well-known to immigrants in precarious situations: “So you can mock yourself, Diana thought. You just don’t want anyone else doing it” (p. 52).

Fitting a comic book adaptation, Miéville employs a very pictorial style that shows how well he has absorbed the source material, providing visual descriptions of objects, of posture, wreckage, ruin, destruction, of the angles and qualities of light, that are very detailed and often leant my guided visualisations of the scenery and the action the feel of a computer game, being so close to the various depictions in BRZRKR but now alive, animated, visceral. Fans will recognise Miéville’s distinct “baroque” writing style, showcasing his love of multisyllabic loan words from all over the world, of playful usages and puns, and defying the oft-stated “writing rule” of eliminating adjectives in the most spectacular ways. Miéville resorts to onomatopoetic comic book language only in the descriptions of B’s rage-fugue (further info for the uninitiated: picture the Hulk, only he looks like Keanu Reeves, andbut with more gore, as in literally punching through heads): bang cut slice (p. 84).

The perspective on B widens with every chapter, adding stories (often contradicting each other) which other characters—interspersed throughout human history—share about B. These are reminiscences that are collected by somebody, a potential antagonist, who follows B through the centuries, who seems to be learning about him and waiting for him rather than seeking him out. What we as readers learn from these stories is that the (observed, experienced) emotions that are shared across cultures and epochs, that make us human, seem to be love and grief (that dedication again). There is also the repeated statement (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) that we know the meaning and the value of things best when we have lost them.

The narrator of “The Servant’s Story,” for example, is a character who worked as a member of the household staff for a former iteration of B, and later became a companion of his. They mention their “ambiguities,” a euphemism which is later revealed to signify that they are intersex (p. 61). Saved by B from a hate crime, they become B’s partner for a lot of that specific life (and most of their own, mortal, one). This story, alongside others, also serves to queer B: in this book he is certainly not a clear-cut heterosexual character. During the lifetime he spends with the servant, B says that he cannot love (in other lifetimes he contradicts himself), but that he does care—and that he also cares about what he inflicts on others (p. 64). To me, this being torn between emotions and responsibilities, these introspective thoughts and worries, speaks of a deep humanity—which B himself seems to be unable to acknowledge. Again, there it is, the intermingling of love and grief. Others notice this, too: “Now, it came to [Diana] that it was hard to see him, to see anyone, strive to be beyond caring, and to care so much” (p. 240).

In “The Wife’s Story,” on the other hand, Miéville takes B down many notches, dethroning him as a hero/superhuman, and implying (to employ a famous Nolan-Batman quote) that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. This chapter also offers a glimpse into how and why victims of abuse tend to seek out their abusers again and/or turn into abusers themselves. Sometimes B is depicted as a brute, as a man who lives violence yet does not understand it. At the same time, he yearns for the possibility of death to give his life, and all things and people in it, meaning. “[T]o give him life worthy of the word. (p. 74) And in between all these stories, these searches for structure and meaning, we can’t help but notice mentions of the dark—“the void before and under and after everything” (p. 18).

So where does Miéville take B in his own take on BRZRKR? It all starts with “Signs of Life.” What works as a fitting chapter title for the readers’ first conscious introductions to the new main plotline is simultaneously quoting the title of an M. John Harrison novel in which the protagonist is nicknamed China. Coincidence, in a playful novel by the same author who, in his breakthrough second novel Perdido Street Station (2000), actually used the phrase “a storm of wings” (another M. John Harrison title) not just once but twice? You decide. This iteration of “signs of life,” though, refers to (among other things, as we shall see later) a freak occurrence that surprises B and sets him off on a new (and old) quest: a soldier from his squad, whose irrefutable death was witnessed by several comrades, is found with a heartbeat, breathing, and trying to speak … before this mysterious, inexplicable, science-defying spark fizzles out and he dies a second death. B spots some tracks in the dust, starts thinking, wanders off—and after a while returns with a newly added, equally central character slung across his shoulder to be dropped on the secret lab’s steel table in the style of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood with the poached deer carcass: it’s a dead babirusa, an Indonesian “deer pig.”

Now, it is quite obvious that, when Reeves invited him to play with his toys, Miéville pulled all of his own toys from the shelf in response. He clearly had a great time introducing references to all his favourite things. Nighttime cityscapes are described like underwater landscapes (p. 109); explosions and falling corpses leave “red stars” (p. 47 and others). If you look closely, you’ll find a stray cuttlefish (p. 36), quotes and references from Marx to Beckett, from Wells’s Dr. Moreau to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a mention of Rabbi Loew and the Golem, stream-of-consciousness worldbuilding (wordbuildplay, wordbuilding!) in the style of Joyce and Bester and also of New Wave SF (p. 245), the word “brummagem” (and, in the same paragraph, the phrase “and thus and so” as a nod to Jack Vance [p. 122]), reiterations of “andbut.” There is a passage on similes and metaphors, recalling a big theme from Miéville’s novel Embassytown (2011, p. 229), and there is some more specialised nerdy stuff, like a direct mention of Star Trek’s Prime Directive (p. 57).

And, with that “deer pig,” there is one more of Miéville’s pet theories, “the porcine uncanny,” that he has B mention directly, including a reference to the works of William Hope Hodgson. [1] The babirusa, soon nicknamed Babe by the scientists in the lab (which makes this story more realistic, if anything—the giant squid, architeuthis dux, in London’s Natural History Museum is really nicknamed Archie, the diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall “Dippy”), turns out to share B’s (controversial) gift of respawning—B says “egging” (p. 203 etc.)—from an egg-shaped chrysalis every time it dies. B/Unute calls it little brother and pig brother (p. 85), since it is another child of the blue lightning. He claims that he once saw a herd of babirusa share his tribe’s fate, with one female babirusa doing exactly what his mother did, consuming a concoction of natural ingredients, talking to a higher power, receiving the blue lightning and creating supernatural, immortal offspring—a bioweapon to avenge and protect the tribe; he brings it to the lab, killed, to demonstrate this (pp. 57-58). As it turns out, B and Babe have met many times in the course of history, and every time Babe has tried to kill B. At the same time, B feels sorry for the pig and keeps trying to “let it stay dead” (p. 84) and failing.

And there it reappears, the porcine uncanny, in another intense mention of the void: “… and if you can hear in the piggy call that sadness of the void that you know will not be filled even by such successful violence, well, there is nothing you can do now to stop this dance” (p. 87). And in B’s response it’s possible to recognise Nietzsche’s abyss: “And here, rising in you in echo, what is this but your own countenance?” (p. 87) Again and again this book points out the (possible) function(s) of symbolic monsters and constantly shifting metaphors, carried by them and/or embodied by them. Just as B/Unute keeps thinking of himself as a reluctant metaphor, he also relates how the babirusa’s tusks, growing back towards its own face, “just keep on growing. They have to grind them down, gnaw on things, scrape them, their whole lives. Imagine if they didn’t” (p. 75). (With this lingering mental image of a killer-pig’s own weapons being constantly aimed at itself, I can’t help but quote Coolio: “Tell me why are we so blind to see / That the ones we hurt are you and me?” [“Gangsta’s Paradise,” Gangsta’s Paradise, 1995] More on this anon.)

With its many references—to mythology, philosophy, psychology, history, physics, the study of monsters, politics, Weird Fiction, comic books—this book is a bit of a Borgesian library. It creates many possible paths. Above and beyond B’s story, you are invited to “create your own adventure.” I want to pick out two paths, though, that both spring from the big “life and death” problem at the heart of this book, and that stayed with me when I closed the book. In turn, these are dualism and “elsewheres.” (And might not one lead to the other?)

Babe—whose rage-fugue is also rendered in comic-book onomatopoeia: Stamp stamp stamp scream scream bite gouge kick (p. 94)—features on both versions of the cover that I’ve come across. I call them the “life” cover (a cave, a hooded figure walking next to a pig silhouette) and the “death” cover (a babirusa skull). This mirrors the “thanatos metaphor” vs. “Life project,” the red lightning vs. blue lightning binary opposition that turns out to be a vast red herring. In hints and seemingly “minor” plotlines (we should know by now that Miéville doesn’t marginalise), an opposite and counterpart to B takes shape: if B is a vector of death, there must also be vectors of life: children of the red lightning, who can animate corpses and dead objects.

B, reminiscing, seems to believe in a world of simple opposites:

Back in the day some people who hated me said I was death, and that the god of life was on their side, and wanted to kill me. I always wanted to say, why the fuck would you think life would give a fuck about you? (p. 115)

On his darker days, he certainly believes in being a metaphor of death: “I am a tool, said he. I am the ending” (p. 119); and thus, in his dualistic worldview, there is an Other—the woman Vayne, who calls herself a daughter of life. Their first meeting is in horrible circumstances, but by their second Vayne has subscribed to my Coolio take (told you it would be important): “Stop it!” she says, “You’re doing this to yourself!” (p. 247). That is, by believing in a war of life vs. death, red lightning vs. blue (and maybe implicitly good vs. evil), they have duped themselves (as many readers may have) into believing that they are antagonists. It seems like their big showdown (much gore, many consecutive deaths) comes very suddenly, but it has been building right in front of our eyes for most of the book: perceptive readers may have noticed what is suddenly pointed out by Diana, that Vayne’s lightning is also blue. The two opposed sides are both children of the same lightning, they are the same. Just as death is a part of life. Once he has internalised this truth, B ends up showing Babe that it doesn’t have to kill him, that they aren’t enemies.

Cue Coolio.

If B is a walking death metaphor, though, the babirusa perfectly symbolises the rapper’s line about hurting ourselves: if the pig’s decision not to interfere with its tusks, to let one grow right into its brain, can be interpreted as suicide or as “self-trepanning” (p. 274) for enlightenment (I wager that there might be a third option: a self-lobotomy, for peace?), the pig brother is clearly also a metaphor: Life and Death are both parts of life, of constant change; the real fight, as it is pointed out, is change vs. stillness. (B: “I wished it peace. I still do.” [p. 274].) The real “big bad” has been mentioned since the beginning: “the thowless,” the darkness, the void, stillness, the end. As in Michael Ende’s Nothing, the antagonist of The Neverending Story (1984), as in Salman Rushdie’s Khattam-Shud, the antagonist of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), whose name is literally the phrase at the end of the fairy tale: The End.

Is this book’s message, then, that you can’t stop change? If so, what about entropy? And what about cyclical time? This is an apocalyptic story, and apocalypse tends towards the end of time/end of history. In Zoroastrian dualism (a huge influence on the belief systems of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and their concomitant cultural storytelling traditions), the opposing powers are always clear-cut: good vs. evil, light vs. dark. Their opposition is resolved by time, and it’s here where entropy comes in. In The Book of Elsewhere, the realisation that entropy moves us closer to the thowless ends the siblings’ war and unites them as their differences resolve. [2]

Finally, what is The Book of Elsewhere? We encounter it as a fictional book inside the novel—a notebook in which B logs all the times he “egged” somewhere far from where he died. He refers to these instances as “elsewheres,” but “elsewhere” also describes the “egg state” (p. 265)—the state in between lives that causes gaps in B’s otherwise perfect memory. He doesn’t know where he goes between lives, or what happens to him there.

We find an answer of sorts in the frame story narrated by Freud (based on a single frame in BRZRKR Vol. 1, in which B reminisces about having been “analyzed”): the father of the uncanny and, it follows, of psychological, political hauntings, of “the return of that which was buried” (p. 13). (There is a cute suggestion that B went to Freud in order to better understand himself—and subsequently changed the doctor’s ideas.)

Freud first explains a crucial misnomer to Unute, telling him that, if he keeps dying and keeps coming back, he isn’t immortal at all, but is rather infinitely mortal (p. 275)—and then he tells him about elsewhere, using a butterfly … well, metaphor. For the primal soup inside the chrysalis of a pupating caterpillar, suspended between lives, the birthing room and the execution chamber are the same: like Schrödinger’s Cat (and this interpretation makes sense, since Freud’s narrative is from the eve of his death in 1939, and Schrödinger published his thought experiment in 1935), the butterfly is suspended between life and death, in Elsewhere, and then emerges not as a caterpillar, but as a completely different animal, into a new life.

So, in his potentially infinite number of lives, B must find infinite value. Things and people are ephemeral—lost and found and lost again (accidental T. S. Eliot/M. John Harrison reference by the reviewer). In this entanglement of love and grief, B must be infinitely human.

The elsewhere isn’t stillness. The egg is change. “To the flashing water say: I am.”

Endnotes

[1] There are pig creatures in Hodgson’s time-travel narrative The House on the Borderland (1908), and the posthumously discovered Carnacki short story “The Hog” (1947) contains the most impressive pig-demon iteration of cosmic horror that I’ve ever come across, producing

a grunting, squealing howling roar that rose, roar by roar, howl by howl and squeal by squeal to a crescendo of horrors - the bestial growths, longings, zests and acts of some grotto of hell.... It is no use, I can’t give it to you. I get dumb with the failure of my command over speech to tell you what that grunting, howling, roaring melody conveyed to me. It had in it something so inexplicably below the horizons of the soul in its monstrousness and fearfulness that the ordinary simple fear of death itself, with all its attendant agonies and terrors and sorrows, seemed like a thought of something peaceful and infinitely holy compared with the fear of those unknown elements in that dreadful roaring melody. (The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder [2006], p. 175)

The porcine uncanny even infests our world (in which BRZRKR is unmistakably set). I’ve discovered a passage from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel of social realism The Jungle, in which he describes Chicago’s Union Stock Yards and the assembly-line slaughter of animals (before going into the working and living conditions of immigrant workers), which eerily evokes William Hope Hodgson’s Hog (pre factum):

Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog squeal of the universe. (p. 45)

[return]

[2] Marxism, too, is essentially apocalyptic. Everything moves towards an end, a resolution, a telos. The goal is to resolve the distinction between the classes, bringing about the end of history. Utopia, though, is literally “no-place.” Things are always moving. Remember the train at the end of Miéville’s Iron Council (2003), which was supposed to bring the revolution to New Crobuzon, and which was frozen by a time golem? Staticness is the enemy of change, but it is also nearly impossible. Even the theorised end of the universe, the Big Crunch, would only result in another Big Bang and start a new cycle. Things stay in motion (the revolution is still possible), everything is change, Rilke’s “flashing water.” Like B/Unute, we don’t have to accept it, it suffices to open our eyes to it. [return]