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I admit it: I was intrigued by the thought of a book by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, so I bought The Book of Elsewhere hot off the press, and I liked it quite a bit. Here’s a little guide to it.
Brief description: John Wick if he were 80,000 years old. (Not a spoiler; this is all over the advertising.)
tl;dr: I recommend this book to people who like SF&F that thoughtfully explores the experience of a preternaturally old protagonist (and who don’t hate John Wick).
Spoiler Free Review
This book follows the adventures of an 80,000-year-old protagonist with super fighting powers, trying to figure out how to become mortal. Nominally set in the present day, about half of it is flashbacks to various points in our hero’s timeline, which do a nice job of fleshing out his experiences and how he has affected the lives of others.
The book’s great strength is its protagonist, who is genuinely interesting and thoughtfully developed. Its great weakness is plot structure, of which is has little, and what it has is not very compelling. These two things are related. This book reminds me of nothing so much as God Emperor of Dune in following a very powerful, very old protagonist who, due to his power and age, just doesn’t have much at stake emotionally. This makes sense. In both cases, the protagonist has enough experience and wisdom to take things in stride and not be deeply fazed by just about anything from life to death to torture to betrayal, etc. The price of this plausible and thought-provoking characterization is low plot conflict and relatively little story momentum. The lack of momentum leads to a fairly week ending, though I think part of its weakness is also due to somewhat shallow exploration (and setup) of themes.
I think both these books could have pulled it off better, but not by all that much. This difficulty is partly baked into the concept. Actually, in both cases, my personal revision recommendation would have been to increase the prominence of the female presence—I’ll be vague to stay spoiler free.
The book gets extra points from me for the character of the pig, which is an excellent example of a non-human animal character who is not (much?) anthropomorphized but—as an animal—is an important character (like, for example, Moby Dick). Well done.
( Spoilery Review )
( Two Sociopolitical Critiques )
Brief description: John Wick if he were 80,000 years old. (Not a spoiler; this is all over the advertising.)
tl;dr: I recommend this book to people who like SF&F that thoughtfully explores the experience of a preternaturally old protagonist (and who don’t hate John Wick).
Spoiler Free Review
This book follows the adventures of an 80,000-year-old protagonist with super fighting powers, trying to figure out how to become mortal. Nominally set in the present day, about half of it is flashbacks to various points in our hero’s timeline, which do a nice job of fleshing out his experiences and how he has affected the lives of others.
The book’s great strength is its protagonist, who is genuinely interesting and thoughtfully developed. Its great weakness is plot structure, of which is has little, and what it has is not very compelling. These two things are related. This book reminds me of nothing so much as God Emperor of Dune in following a very powerful, very old protagonist who, due to his power and age, just doesn’t have much at stake emotionally. This makes sense. In both cases, the protagonist has enough experience and wisdom to take things in stride and not be deeply fazed by just about anything from life to death to torture to betrayal, etc. The price of this plausible and thought-provoking characterization is low plot conflict and relatively little story momentum. The lack of momentum leads to a fairly week ending, though I think part of its weakness is also due to somewhat shallow exploration (and setup) of themes.
I think both these books could have pulled it off better, but not by all that much. This difficulty is partly baked into the concept. Actually, in both cases, my personal revision recommendation would have been to increase the prominence of the female presence—I’ll be vague to stay spoiler free.
The book gets extra points from me for the character of the pig, which is an excellent example of a non-human animal character who is not (much?) anthropomorphized but—as an animal—is an important character (like, for example, Moby Dick). Well done.
( Spoilery Review )
( Two Sociopolitical Critiques )
