He’s the 21st century’s Renaissance man, but can Keanu Reeves write?
The actor’s novel has a terrific premise: What if, instead of a mortal who longs to be immortal, the hero is an immortal who longs for death?
Iam not sure that anyone watching the time-travel comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989 would have pointed to Keanu Reeves and said: This man. This goofy, guitar-bothering surfer dude will come to embody the unease of a millennium in The Matrix series (1999-2021).
He will transition seamlessly into an action hero in John Wick (2014-present). He will become arguably one of the most beloved American actors of his generation and one of Time magazine’s most influential figures of the 21st century, somehow combining cult and mainstream appeal.
Now Reeves, 59, has co-written a pulpy, genre-bending novel with the muchgarlanded British sci-fi writer China Miéville, to which he must have been tempted to append the tagline from John Wick 3 – “Guns. Lots of guns” (itself pinched from The Matrix).
The Book of Elsewhere, an ultra-violent tale of an immortal warrior (“I kill... I die... I come back”), is crammed with fights and dismemberments, intestines and slaughter.
It takes its lead from Reeves’ successful comic-book series BRZRKR, which started in 2021, with pictures of a moody hero with a “long fringe of black hair” who looks, well, suspiciously like Reeves.
Expanded and novelised by Miéville, Reeves’ relentless gore-fest now has room not only for vowels but for existential angst, mythological flourishes and long words such as “cachinnation” and “metaflora”.
We might have known that Reeves was harbouring literary ambitions as soon as he started saying words like “gestalt” in interviews and publishing hand-stitched collections of poetry. Or when the titles of his fighting franchise began to play with the conventions of movie punctuation (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum).
Some would say the biggest clue came when Wick killed a man with a hardback in a library. “I once saw him kill three men in a bar ... with a pencil, with a f...ing pencil,” one of his enemies says. Looking back, all the signs were there that Reeves was just itching to write a novel. Or at least have his name on one.
Our hero is the unkillable warrior Unute, who has lived for 80,000 years, “ancient when Gilgamesh was young”. He has killed mammoths with their own tusks, spent three lifetimes sitting on a rock on a mountainside waiting to see what will happen and has even performed in a pub production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape to an audience of 20 people, one of whom was the playwright.
He wants to be able to die and he has suffered all manner of pain and torn flesh. But he always respawns like a character in a computer game. Is he half god? Or some kind of alien? Perhaps Sigmund Freud, making a cameo (much as he does in Bill & Ted), has some answers.
The action is mostly set in a dystopian future where Unute has come to an uneasy deal with a US government black-ops team. If he can help them to destroy a sinister evil force, the scientists will help him to become mortal.
I mean, you have to say, that’s a terrific premise. What if, instead of a mortal who longs to be immortal, the hero is an immortal who longs for death? The problem is that the authors’ “what-ifs’’ get out of hand. What if the hero can be killed, but then rehatches from an egg? What if the hero was also being chased through history by some similarly unkillable creature with a grudge? No sooner have Reeves and Miéville thought up this weird antagonist than we have the most surprising intrusion of a pig into a story since David Cameron’s premiership. “Nothing has ever hated me like that pig,” Unute says.
The novel has polyphonic urges too. In chapters with Chaucerian titles (The Servant’s Story, The Wife’s Story etc), we hear from secondary characters throughout history about how their lives have been disrupted by Unute.
Unfortunately, Reeves and Miéville use the excuse of an 80,000-year-old timeframe to overdose on “whences” and “thereafters”. It becomes exhausting trying to unpick sentences like: “If the unconscious is above all driven to avoid unpleasure, whence came such repeated goings-back to agonies?”
While other sentences would make your ears bleed if you read them out loud: “Know you, said they, where walks a boar after he with whom once you walked?”. But if you’ve seen Reeves gamely scowling and monotoning his way through Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, you’ll know the vibe.
The trouble spreads to the contemporary sections as well, which are bloated with jargon, inverted sentences and a pile-up of adjectives (“intimate allergic tenderness”). Whole paragraphs are barely decipherable, with phrases such as “subliming off it with its own surplus quiddity”. How do you “sublime off” something? And what is “surplus quiddity”?
Overall, it reads as if Miéville has taken Reeves’ most colourful performances, fed the script into AI and produced a sort of hybrid language. Reevesian.
And talking of the whirling of rotors, there’s just so much action and noise for so little gratification. I lost track of all the many absurd reversals: “Vayn thought she was life and I was death. It was a lie!” OK, just wake me up when you’ve figured it out.
With so many things constantly and pointlessly happening, I felt like I’d been reading the novel for 80,000 years.
This is not to deny its merits. I enjoyed the ideas. Miéville and Reeves are really grappling with something here – memory, immortality, death, pain, the whole sweep of human history. Some sections have real vigour and spirit and at times the scattershot sentences do quiver into eerie life.
Suffice to say, however, that it’s likely to be far more compelling once millions of dollars of special effects have been thrown at it. The Hollywood star intends to play Unute in a live-action Netflix adaptation, while an anime series is in the works.
In the end, one can only really stand in awe of Reeves, the 21st-century Renaissance man, determined to squeeze 80,000 years of activity into one mortal lifespan. You know he still plays bass in his band Dogstar? And just to warn you, he recently revealed his ambition to learn
the cello. – The Times
The Book of Elsewhere, an ultra-violent tale of an immortal warrior (“I kill
... I die ... I come back”), is crammed with fights and dismemberments, intestines and slaughter.
The Book of Elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, is
out now.