A perfect marriage of author and muse. China Mieville turns Reeves' epic tale into a multifaceted exploration of character, time, and what makes us human.

If I'm honest this book wasn't for me. I struggled to piece together the story in my head and found much of the Story confusing. I'm sure this book is like marmite, you'll either love it or hate it. I just felt like it didn't flow well as a story,I don't have problems with books going back and forth, but they normally work well together.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. For the first 10% of this read I was extremely confused, it takes time to get into it however I did enjoy it for the most part. I think this could have been structured somewhat differently to make it more accessible, especially to those who are not familiar with the comics on which this is inspired. The writing itself is lovely, but be warned that this is not a straightforward narrative for light reading, its a thought provoking intense kind of read.

I first picked up this book because of Keanu Reeves. I have never read a China Miéville novel before so was curious about that aspect of the novel. This was a really surreal book (and that is not a complaint) but very beautifully written. It does require a lot of concentration to weed out all the twists and turns apparent in this novel (and for the fact that you are bowled headlong into the action from the get-go without any build-up.) I don't know if you really need to have read the graphic novels/comic books that preceded this to be able to immerse yourself in the storyline better but I think it probably would help a tad? I didn't know there were previous comic books, and so haven't read them.

A complex and mind-blowing adventure.

Where to start with this book? Well, it's inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books, also created by Keanu Reeves. The comics follow an immortal and immoral warrior, known as Berzerker, as he fights his way through the ages. However in "The Book of Elsewhere", B as he is known, now wants to be able to die, after all, he is more than 80,00 years old. A secret black-ops group promises him they can help with that and all they want in return is his co-operation with a few things. And that's when it gets ugly. What follows is a mad, bizarre and complex tale of conspiracy, deception, murder and soul-searching. There's violence and horror, and some more violence. To try and summarise any more of the story is impossible.

I haven't read the comics, so I can't tell whether or not having done so would help when reading this novel. It's what might be called a "high-concept" novel, which for me means the language can be difficult to digest. It will divide readers, without a doubt. It doesn't flow, so much as move along in spurts and jolts. There are clues hidden everywhere and the multiple timelines / time shifts mean constant back-and-forth checks to see what actually happened and who said what. There's also a lot of reflection about what it means to be immortal. A lot. Fans of the genre will likely discuss this book for years to come, others will either throw it in the bin, or re-read it to see what they missed.

I'm a fan of China Miéville, so I'm familiar with his style of writing, and his voice is easily heard in this oddly-constructed and complex story. The prose is pure Perdido Street Station. That said, close your eyes and you'll visualise John Wick / Neo / Johnny Mnemonic as you read about B. However, the book could arguably have been half the length and still told the same story.

It's a book definitely worth seeking out, but be warned it's a tough read.

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I was a bit worried when I read the prologue as I found it hard to take in. It was not an easy read and I'm still not 100% sure how it all fit together. However, I did end up enjoying the book and found the concept fascinating and refreshing.

Initially I was interested in the book as a fan of Keanu so I didn't know what I was letting myself in for. I did find it hard to get into the world of the book at first but I did slowly pick it up more as I went on, I am glad I pushed myself to keep reading as I enjoyed it and understood slightly more as I read on.

Keanu Reeves co-writing his debut novel with China Mieville was one of the more surprising book announcements of recent years, and I suspect a lot of fans are going to be doubly thrown when they pick this up, given it takes place in the same world as Reeves' likewise co-written debut comic BRZRKR, which did good business by indie comics standards, but possibly not by celebrity novelist standards. And without that grounding, you might take a while to twig that 'the man' of the opening is the same individual as B and Unute, never mind to parse the descriptions of him and realise, as was instantly apparent if you saw him drawn by Ron Garney, that this 80,000-year-old warrior bears a striking visual resemblance to a certain actor turned writer.

At this stage we should probably address the whole celebrity author bugbear. Obviously, I can't speak definitively to the division of labour, because I wasn't in the room where it happened, or even the Slack (though equally obviously I'd love to get a glimpse). But I have read other Matt Kindt comics, and not really rated them, and BRZRKR didn't read quite the same as them, and does share a definite vibe with The Book Of Elsewhere. Which, in turn, doesn't read quite like the other Mieville I've read - and that's almost all of it, most of which I loved. At the same time, Mieville is definitely not subsumed here; in particular, the way that the central anomaly of Unute deforms the world around him, attracts a dizzying ecosystem of conspiracies and cults, reminded me of one of my favourite Mievilles, Kraken. And to an extent my least favourite tic of his, the deliberate anticlimax, is here too - though from a different angle, and to a different end.

It would be simplistic to say that BRZRKR is the loud and this the quiet side of the same story. More than that, flat wrong; the novel opens with an explosion, includes plenty of fights along the way, and offers one memorable scene in which B rips a guy's arm off, then uses it to knock the former owner's head clean off too. But at the same time, each medium has its own strengths, and there are definitely chapters here which wouldn't have been a particularly sensible use of page space in a comic, such as a dying Sigmund Freud recalling his sessions with the man he gradually realised might not be speaking metaphorically about his repeated deaths and rebirths. And mostly, it was these thoughtful interludes that I enjoyed here, especially Unute talking about the strange things he's seen over the centuries to frustrated mortals who don't get why he would only be mentioning this now - but he's seen so very much, and remembers it all, and how could he possibly know which bits to tell them unless they ask? Sometimes it's tiny details, like loving the ritual of vinyl for himself, but struggling to understand how the mayflies around him could possibly have the patience for it.

And then there's the plot, which does eventually cohere into something a bit more conventional, for my money not that successfully, though as I say, I suspect that's at least partly deliberate. First, we have Unute's long quest to determine whether he's the only immortal, why he's like this, and his finally letting the secret agency with which he currently works know that, oh yeah, there is one other that he's not mentioned before - but it's a pig. Not metaphorically. Not even a mighty war-boar, but a babirusa, pretty much the dictionary definition of a weird little guy, with dentistry issues worse than the NHS. And this bit I did sometimes wish could have been in the comic, because I would have loved to see him trotting through the carnage, not that they don't write delightfully here of the creature "perfecting a proud, nonskulking pigness that leaves trained experts thinking, I am seeing things, I am hallucinating a pig in pigless halls, crossing the world to be here. To stare at you." And the point of this pig? Well, in amongst the wrestling with the biggest issues of the lot, life and death, stillness and change, the rise and fall of civilisations including many that would now be entirely forgotten if not for one indestructible destroyer, one of The Book Of Elsewhere's fascinations is metaphor, and how sometimes the most powerful ones can be either painfully obvious, or else so hard to read that it's difficult to know quite what they signify even while they are freighted with so much power that they definitely mean something. And what better illustration of that than a sure-to-be-bestselling novel about a 75,000-year-old pig?

(Netgalley ARC)

When Keanu Reeves co-authors a book, you read it. That is the law. But yikes.

2.5*

At the time of reviewing this, <i>The Book of Elsewhere</i> has no blurb. So yes, I admit to having read it because of Keanu Reeves. Incidentally, I’m not into weird fiction and this is my first China Miéville, so maybe I was doomed from the beginning.

Unute, also known as B. He’s been called a demigod, a god, a weapon from the aliens, a brother, chaos, the Angel of Death, a ghost. He’s an enigma, mostly. And what a boring enigma he is.

This is the type of book for readers who don’t mind not understanding what is going on. I’m not this type of reader. The first 50 pages, I didn’t get anything. It was a very frustrating experience. Then I started seeing the book as a scavenger hunt: in every chapter there will be one sentence that would be the topic of the next chapter, and so on.

The thing is, the chapters itself were confusing because the writing danced around the topics and actions instead of saying things. For example, something happens to Diana. She meets B to talk about it. Around 15 pages are wasted with him being vague AF and then it all concludes with him not saying anything. Then we get an ‘interlude’ of 20 pages when, in the end, you get a hint of maybe perhaps what could be related to what happened to Diana (and again, a sentence in the interlude introduces something that will be brought up next).

You’d expect a scavenger hunt to have some sort of reward, and the only sweet reward I got from this book was that it ended. It was redundant, vague, and it honestly felt irrelevant. It’s actually sad because most of it was fascinating, but it was as fascinating and creative as it was pointless. I was very intrigued by most of it, but the slow and murky unravelling of it all was brutally underwhelming. I did like the ending but I couldn’t appreciate it because I was fed up with it all.

I’ll just conclude by saying that if I was an immortal being and my only boon were glowy eyes and a pig that followed me around, I’d pass.

Content warning: animal torture (pigs)

This is a curious, engaging and highly creative novel which at times seems familiar to the work of Gaiman and Mieville himself whilst also being very much its own beast. It's not immediately obvious what is happening and it's a book that initially makes you work to realise what is going on. The tale of the immortal Unute features the occasional incidences of body horror and inhumane scientific experimentation that were similarly integral to Justin Cronin's The Passage. The mythical features reminded me of elements of Gaiman's American Gods. The creativity and otherworldliness are very much in keeping with Mievilles' oeuvre and the links with Reeves' BRZRKR are front and central to the plot's progression.

I really enjoyed the novel and amongst its most impressive achievements is establishing this fantastical tale in a very well-realised world that is both similar to our own but also very much alien to us. Mieville and Reeves aren't a pairing that I originally would have put together but like cheese and Marmite they are a surprisingly complimentary blend.

The book follows the story of Unute, an immortal man who has lived for tens of thousands of years. The plot follows the "present", where Unute is working with a secret US military unit, and shows glimpses of his past and people who he encountered on this journey. It's hard to succinctly describe what the story is about, other than the psychology of being immortal, and the effect it has on people who know of it. While there is a lot of action (a la Keanu), there is a lot of philosophy, self reflection, and social criticism (a la Mieville).

I really liked reading it, and the story overall. While being an interesting mashup of Keanu's Graphic novels and Mieville's dominant style, the book also had, at least for me, strong echoes of Neil Gaiman's atmospheric books. The atmosphere and the disquiet it elicits was, from my perspective, the main attraction in the book. I also found the exploration of the myth of Unute and its reverbrations across generations and societies and interesting thought experiment, challenging and inverting the concept of God-ness.

The only thing I struggled with is the character development, which was a bit lacking, especially in contrast to other works by Mieville. While Unute was well explored, the other protagonists were more superficially depicted, without really thinking through or understanding their motivations, which I would have loved to learn more about.

I'm also of two minds about the pacing of the book. On the one hand, being plunged neck deep into the story from page 1, without any pre-amble, is confusing and irritating. It takes a long time to understand what really is going on - who's who, and the why of it all. On the other hand, there is an echo in it of Unute's own experience - this disorientation is telling and exemplifies what it must feel like at times for him. On balance, I liked it, but did find it tough.

Bottom line is that while it's not as good as Bas-Lag or King Rat, it's a great book by Mieville, and I highly recommend it to fans of the author, or the New Weird and Urban Fantasy genres more broadly.

My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.