The Book Of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

Only broken tools know they are tools.

I was never a big fan of Thomas Hobbes. This is not an indictment of his philosophical output, or his quasi-geometrical political theory; I just never worried about him. De Homine and Leviathan aside, I was aware of him mostly because of my ex-wife whose pride in her dilettante philosophical and political learning lead her to proffer her profound distaste for those proponents of the social contract, amongst which were Hobbes and Rousseau. And, of course, from the album The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake. So, imagine my surprise when, after roundly dissing my own creative* raison d’etre by deriding the intertextual path of my own learning, I found that in the very next book I read for review, based on nothing other than its primacy in the cultural consciousness (and its lurid pink lettering which was hard to ignore), none other than Keanu Reeves** provides another example of the negative answer to Hobbes’ Ship of Theseus poser.

This of course might be due to the frequency in which the Ship of Theseus paradox comes up in the body of contemporary literature, given the prevalence of fear over the use of AI and the supposed redundancy of human labour in the near-to-medium-term future, or it could be a consequence of the frequency illusion on my part. However, I choose to believe in luck, fate and the God(s) of Intertextuality!***

As ever, context is key, so here we have a novel starring an immortal warrior, a rather unseemly eidolon of Keanu Reeves’ many on-screen instantiations (not necessarily representative of Reeves himself, but if the lyrical barrenness of his “band’s” musical output is down to him and is anything to go by, I can’t imagine this one-dimensional avatar is not how he sees the darker urges of his personality manifest themselves). This warrior, called by his Unit and nominal commanders simply B (his given name appears to be Unute), is unkillable in the broadest sense. His body can be stopped – in fact he dies potentially thousands of times during the novel – but he returns unharmed (except in one specific aspect which becomes a plot device later), birthed from a fleshy egg, most often in the same place he dies but occasionally, for a reason made clear later, somewhere else. His Unit seems to be fighting some covert war – against what and for what it is never entirely made clear, although the hidden agenda of one of the main support characters is strongly hinted at almost straight away – and B is their Big Gun which, when activated, often results in friendly fire deaths. Indeed, the book opens on a scene where someone, wracked with, what, survivor’s guilt? Religious fear? Anyway, this guy blows himself and his comrades up in an attempt to kill Unute once and for all, a forlorn action that everyone knows was doomed to failure so does feel very much gratuitous except to set the bloody tone of the rest of the novel.

Intrigue, intrigue, blood and guts, lots of backstory provided by diaries of long-dead people, and then we get to the Hobbesian stuff. It turns out that, with Unute’s personally disinterested blessing – he doesn’t care what the good/bad guys do so long as he can find a way to become mortal (not that he wishes to die, he simply wants the option given his age stands at somewhere close to 100,000 years and he’s a bit bored) – one of the good guys has been collecting bits of dead Unutes with a view to building a fleshy golem in his image (it seems Miéville loves a golem). He succeeds, in a roundabout sort of way, and we get our answer: no, the discarded bits all mashed together into a Frankenstein’s monster is nothing like the original Unute, despite being as strong, as fast, and as unkillable, for a limited period of time.

Take that Hobbes.

To be fair to the book, I’m hanging this review on a very unstable hook. I’ve left out lots of juicy bits, the slow drip-feed of exposition, the angry immortal pig (yep, there’s an angry immortal pig), and of course, me ol’ China’s startlingly original voice which sings clearly through the graphic novel, sci-fi fan-boy stodginess of the conceit and adds some wonderful vocal flourishes, and left-leaning, impious notes, to what might otherwise have been a dreadful, dreadful mess. It’s a quick read, but impeccably paced and suspenseful. Add in the nods (unless I’ve mis-read the room) to the personal tragedies of Reeves’ own life, and to the baying hounds of the cult of personality/celebrity, and it suddenly has a few layers. I was prepared to hate this book, but I ended up not minding it a bit, and in fact enjoyed the bloodiness in places. There are some insubstantial characters that could have been trimmed; it's hard to believe that after eighty thousand years of very slow progress investigating the phenomena of himself, it all comes to a head in a very short period of time - during this novel in fact, can you believe it?! And if subjected to any serious scrutiny, the blue lightening nonsense stands up like gossamer thread to a typhoon, but all in all, I had a great time reading this instead of The Artist’s Way and putting any serious time into my efforts to be considered a writer in my own right.

*I’m trying to avoid using the voice of my inner censor in these articles in an attempt to notice but ignore the reasoned, logical advice therefrom that anything I write is in and of itself inherently flawed and therefore comical, but honestly, it’s much harder than it sounds. I’ve tried calling that voice Jesus so it’s easier, but in truth it just makes me want to hear from him more so I can laugh at myself. Go figure.

**I sincerely doubt (but may be pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise) that Reeves was the philosophical engine behind this collaboration

***I laughed as I was writing that, but only a vey small laugh, and in hindsight I am now embarrassed by the whole sentence and also this one.

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