Book Review: Keanu Reeves and China Miéville’s The Book of Elsewhere

Though John Wick may have returned Keanu Reeves to the A-list, he has always done what he wants on his own terms, stretching his acting ability and extracurricular interests while unafraid of being the butt of jokes. Most actors would salivate at a multimillion-dollar Netflix deal. Keanu would much rather adapt his own 2021 comic book series into the streamer’s next big franchise and decide to use the exposure to partner with lauded British sci-fi writer China Miéville for a sprawling novel loosely based on that world in the interim. As their collaboration, The Book of Elsewhere, demonstrates, Reeves has a lot more in common with Gen-X lifelong artistes like Ethan Hawke than actors content to cash their check from the latest franchise cameo or geezer teaser. 

Set in the near future, The Book of Elsewhere carefully unspools the millenia-long tale of Unute or–as his friends call him–“B”, a demigod-like being who finds himself resurrected in perpetuity during every epoch in which he has met what seems like his ultimate fate. A humanist with a passion for culture both high and low, Unute is prone to blind fits of violence when provoked that result in the indiscriminate deaths of anyone in his path. Agreeing to work with a black-ops group in an organization that merges the worst tendencies of the military-industrial complex and Big Pharma in exchange for a cure to his condition, Unute hopes to finally find a place in the world. But, as he quickly learns, even dozens of lifetimes are inadequate to fully realize such self-discovery.

Though the novel could have easily descended into a vanity project or celebrity-publishing cash grab, Reeves and Miéville aim to drag Freudian psychosis into an era that would much rather obscure meanings than probe them. As the duo write, Unute wants, “Death not as destination, but as horizon. Not death up close. His desire not for the end but to continue not-ending in a quite new way…What could it be, to exist with the banality of endlessness?” It’s an existential conundrum even transhumanism’s greatest critics have not expressed so eloquently. 

While Miéville’s talent is as endless as Unute’s life, he has displayed a tendency of playing his Euro-socialist cards a bit too fast and loose in his previous efforts. Yet, the weight of Reeves’s stardom and the multimedia universe the actor is willing into existence anchors Miéville’s writing in a refreshing even-handedness that finds him focused on grappling with metaphysical themes that base political ideology is ill-equipped to address. In The Book of Elsewhere, the duo have created a blockbuster world that balances lyrically written pulp with the big questions that have been the fodder of the Great books for centuries. 

The Book of Elsewhere is now available wherever books are sold.