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The Book of Elsewhere, the new novel co-authored by Keanu Reeves and English writer China Miéville, opens with troops in futuristic gear, a gunfight and an explosion. We’re solidly in “military science-fiction thriller” territory – or at least until the second chapter, which is set in 1939, and its first-person narrator is … Sigmund Freud.
When he’s asked about this odd narrative progression, on a Zoom call with Miéville, Reeves simply smiles and pumps his fist: “Yes!”
While Reeves goes way back with Freud (who was a minor character in 1989′s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), the Hollywood megastar’s enthusiasm emerges from the fun he’s clearly having with a franchise he has created himself. Its main character, simply known as “B,” made his debut in the ultraviolent and ultrapopular BRZRKR comics series (2021–23), which Reeves co-wrote with graphic novelist Matt Kindt; a film (starring Reeves) and an anime series are in development at Netflix.
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In every format – including fiction – Reeves has encouraged his collaborators to take the character in decidedly different directions, while retaining a set of core ideas. Reeves says he dreamt up B around 2017, when John Wick: Chapter 2 was released. Like Wick and Neo from the Matrix series, B is both supremely good at fighting and possessed of inner depths.
Keanu Reeves.Brian Bowen Smith/Supplied
Author China Miéville.Barney Cokeliss/Supplied
He’s also trying to find ways to move beyond the need for violence – or maybe through it to the other side. “It’s a well-worn road in archetypal storytelling,” Reeves acknowledges, citing stories that, he says, “have come to me and that I’ve been part of telling – offhand, John Wick, John Constantine, even Ted Theodore Logan [from Bill and Ted], are all looking for a kind of emancipation through violence; sometimes it’s for the individual, and sometimes it’s for the community.”
Born 80,000 years ago to a family of hunter-gatherers who use him as a weapon to defeat other tribes, B survives through the ages by being strong enough to literally rip people apart, able to heal supernaturally quickly and even come back from the dead. Slay him and he’ll simply return – albeit perhaps in another part of the world, hatching from an egg. He wreaks havoc in battles from prehistory through the near future, like a demonic Forrest Gump.
But in The Book of Elsewhere, you might also find him in an office discussing the finer points of Eames chairs, or at a friend’s house translating poetry from Polish to courtly Arabic, or on the couch of the father of psychoanalysis. Where other “celebrity novelists” have mostly lent their names to undemanding genre work, Reeves picked a literary wild card with Miéville.
Best known for novels such as Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009), Miéville regularly wins science fiction and fantasy awards but considers himself a writer of “weird fiction”– when he isn’t publishing books on political history and philosophy. His prose has a gritty texture; in The Book of Elsewhere, the obscure or borrowed words he deploys – “caruncle,” “ruach,” “thowless” – imbue the story with an arcane, timeless quality.
He and Reeves both compliment and complement one another. Joining the call from Berlin, Miéville is the shaven-headed, buff, bespectacled and Oxbridge-accented yin to Reeves’s familiar bearded, rangy, California-via-Toronto yang. Reeves, who alternates between an almost scholarly earnestness and mischievous excitability, says he first approached Miéville to work on the novel after reading his 2015 short-story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion. “What struck me was how incredibly well China integrated fantasy and reality. BRZRKR is in that realm.”
Miéville says he was “surprised and moved to discover that he was particularly into the short stories – that doesn’t happen very often.”
Fittingly, The Book of Elsewhere integrates a longer narrative, told in the third person, in which B carries out covert operations for the United States military and participates in experiments he hopes will reveal to him something about his opaque origins, with a series of short-story-like chapters set in other places and times. Some chapters give us a kind of limited access to B’s point of view – albeit in the second person – and others are narrated by characters with whom he interacts.
“The aspiration,” Miéville offers, “is to say, ‘There are things you can do with a novel that you cannot do with other art forms.’ And one of them is precisely change voice, change tenor, change pacing, but yet create a unified whole.”
Reeves describes his own role as that of a “general editor.” He says, “China laid out some of the architecture for the novel. We had conversations about what was important to me, and he shared what was interesting to him, and then I worked with the first and second draft, giving comments and notes. China was very generous; he was like, ‘If you hate it, tell me,’ which I never did.”
“When Keanu said, ‘I never did,’” Miéville interjects, “it meant, ‘I never did hate it,’ rather than, ‘I never did tell him that I hated it.’ The dreaded outcome would be that I worked on this for a while and then he, being a mensch, doesn’t have it in him to say, ‘I really hate this!’”
Reeves wasn’t uncritical: He knows enough not to risk the substantial goodwill he’s built up with fans by leaving them confused or disappointed. Originally, The Book of Elsewhere was going to open with what is now the second (Freud) chapter; however, says Miéville, “Keanu reasonably was saying, ‘It’s quite an elliptical opening, and you’ve got to remember there are going to be people coming from the comic. We need to establish that there’s a contract between writers and reader.’”
With The Book of Elsewhere, Miéville says, “We worked quite hard to walk the line: I really want people to love it, but for it not to have been fully what they expected. That, to me, is exciting.”
Says Reeves, “There’s that whole sense of, ‘Give the people what they want,’ but I think there’s also room for invention. The novel doesn’t pander.”
Reeves and Miéville have used B’s convention-shattering story to explore some puzzling aspects of human nature, such as how we can decry violence while finding it fun to watch – or read about.
“One of my favourite passages in the book,” says Reeves, is about “one character that’s on the side of life [versus] the main character’s perspective on death – how much he gets tortured.” He lets out a mock-maniacal laugh: “Hee heeeee hee heee! I think there has to be suffering in our stories.”
He leaves the last word to Miéville: “The book is very interested in a playful but serious way in the way Freud approaches humanity. We contain multitudes; we are legion. We are the best of times and the worst of times.”
He continues: “We are wonderful things, even if we are capable of very difficult things. Yes, there is an erotics to violence and a compulsion to violence. But that doesn’t mean we’re all psychopaths and sociopaths. In art, you can ruminate on that constitutive contradiction.”