Keanu Reeves and China Miéville seem a most unlikely pair – a thought-provoking writer with subversive tendencies and a Hollywood superstar – and it is a shock to the system that they have come together as the joint authors of “The book of elsewhere”.
Sean Sheehan
Everyone will have seen Keanu Reeves in one movie or another, most memorable for many in “The Matrix” because its philosophical ideas make it an unforgettable film; more recently, in the John Wick series of awful action films.
According to a website that calculates this kind of thing, his net worth is US$380 million. Reeves is not a great actor but he enjoys a high likeability factor and his bland, wooden presence is not a handicap when a physical role is at the heart of a movie.
China Miéville is one of the truly great writers of fantasy/sci-fi – witness “Perdido Street Station”, “The city and the city” and “Embassy town” – as well as notable non-fiction with “A spectre, haunting: on the communist manifesto” and “October: The story of the Russian revolution”. It has been a good few years since he last wrote a work of fiction and tremendous anticipation accompanied news of his collaboration with Reeves on a novel.
The storyline in “The book of elsewhere” is fantastic: an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior by the name of Unute (also known as B) is the main player in a US special-ops team relentlessly fighting their enemies. It remains unclear who Unute and his comrades are fighting and what they stand for.
It is a little odd that Miéville goes along with this thread of warfare without questioning its politics.
Miéville, one assumes, is who gives the writing a certain literary style, as when we read how Unute ‘crossed humanless continents on land bridges long sunk, who had stabbed mammoths to death with their own tusks, who had been ancient when Gilgamesh was young’ but flourishes like these become rarer as the narrative proceeds.
Presumably, too, Miéville is responsible for investing Unute with his metaphysical longing – not to die but to be able to die. He craves mortality: “Death not as a destination but as horizon”.
This – and oblique references to Althusser’s notion of interpellation and a quote from Walter Benjamin – is all good stuff but as the novel proceeds the narrative increasingly becomes a repetitive account of killing and being killed in various grisly ways by the elite commandos and their foes. A strange prehistoric pig who is hunting Unute becomes important to the plot but not to the reader and there is another human character, Dr Diana Ahuja, who is also interested in Unute but only to study his unusual powers.
The US military is keen to learn more about a warrior who can go berserk and kill with ferocity without being taken out by the enemy.
This is a perplexing novel and the jury is out as to whether it works as a successful piece of fiction.
“The book of elsewhere”, edited by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, is published by Del Rey.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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