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labingiI 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
I think the book really succeeds in crafting the protagonist, Unute. At 80,000 years old, he may be the oldest basically human character I’ve encountered (well, minus of the memories of the preborn in the Dune verse). That’s a tremendously long time, maybe a third(ish) of the whole history of modern Homo sapiens, and the book does a good job of expressing that. I like the idea that civilizations have risen and fallen far more often that we modern folk think: including the development of writing, horse riding, even fairly advanced technology (ex. gun powder) several times. Though this isn’t archaeologically evidenced in real life, there’s still a lot we don’t know, and looking across a times pan about 15 times longer than recorded history, it makes sense there’d be a lot of weirdness we can’t guess at.
Most of Unute’s life has been spent among peoples whose names, languages, and societies are completely erased by time. He’s hung out with other species of hominids before their extinction. He’s spent many years in parts of the world prior to human migration as the only human there. Though this is a story mostly grounded in our everyday world (not a fantasy really), he’s seen—and embodies—a lot of weirdness that defies our science’s explanations. That all comes across well, building him into a character who (like Leto II) has experienced most things before, is rarely surprised, and takes almost everything in stride.
I like the idea that across his life he’s done just about everything: he’s been “good,” “bad,” rich, poor, acted as a god, devil, ordinary person, been aloof, been cruel, been kind, been commitment-averse, been committed to partners till they die of old age, been careful, been careless, and so on. At the same time, I don’t think this is the only possible trajectory for someone in his position. Another might be moving toward a kind of Buddha consciousness, which is a more the model followed in The Man from Earth (a mere 15,000 years old). This gives Unute something of his own personality and approach to life while keeping his experience generally plausible for someone of his age.
He also goes into fugue states in which he commits superhuman levels of violence against whatever is around him. He can be killed but his remains form an egg or cocoon out of which he hatches again, as an adult. He is joined in this strange existence—apparently conjured by a mother praying to the lightning to have an extraordinary child—by a pig almost as old as he is, who he has been crossing paths with periodically for, say, 75,000 years.
The pig is very well depicted. Part of the special powers that come with this existence, at least for Unute, is a perfect memory. Pig memory might be a bit different, but it seems the pig mostly shares this characteristic. At least, it changes a lot over the years, for example, from not responding much to Unute to virulently hating him/attacking him. It’s not a POV character, which I like, because who knows how a pig would think? It is really a pig; it doesn’t speak or anything. At the same time, it’s a super-pig with 75,000 years of pig life experience, which makes it a unique character, well realized.
Less well realized is the other super-“sibling,” Vayn, a woman who is also a human/“lightning” hybrid. She’s not a bad character per se, but like Ghanima in the Dune books, she’s just not used much. This is a missed opportunity in both stories, I think. Were I to suggest a way to get more power out of The Book of Elsewhere’s plot, I might have oriented it around the incident (in the book) where Unute, for very understandable reasons, drives Vayn away. He could have really regretted this later because it could have been his last chance to have the companionship of a non-pig individual like him. A few ten thousands of years go past, and he’s convinced she’s really gone—if not dead, then never coming back. And while he’ll go on fairly calmly, this could have been a lasting wound. Then, she could have come back. That might have packed a bit more punch. It might also have addressed the book's tendency to trivialize women, not intentionally or grossly, just in the grand old tradition of mostly not exploring what could be interesting about them (see Ghanima).
A few gripes:
The titular book is not in the story enough to deserve to be the title. I get that its ultimate insignificance is part of the point, but it could have been made to initially seem significant.
The ending is weak, not only because of weak plotting but little thematic exploration. The story sets up the idea that Unute is a force of Death and Vayn is a force of Life, and life is inimical to death and wants to destroy it... and no one really remarks, “Is life inimical to death though?” What would that mean? This is an obvious philosophical question. Stories about the ill consequences of trying to thwart death go back to ancient times, yet everyone seems to accept that Life and Death are obvious opponents. Then, this frame abruptly (and with little setup that I saw) shifts to Change vs. Stillness/Entropy. Same thing. Why are these inimical? No one really asks. This shift is treated as the story’s big revelation, but it feels to me like just substituting one broad, unexplored allegory for another.
Still in all, I enjoyed it and found it different and through provoking, two things I find increasingly rare in my reading and appreciate a lot.
Two Sociopolitical Critiques
It’s often said that there’s no such thing as an apolitical position on issues in cultural dispute. For example, never discussing race in an ensemble TV show set in modern America is not racially apolitical but a political move (intentionally or not) that obscures racialization as an organizational principle in the US. This book reads to me as an attempt to be “apolitical” that assumes a political valence through its silences.
Unute remarks at several points that he rarely encounters anything new. You know what would be new? The climate emergency.
The emergency we are current living through is categorically different from anything Unute would have observed in 80,000 years—wildly, almost unimaginably different. Yet this book seems to exist in a parallel universe where this ecological collapse isn’t happening, as it is never remarked upon once. Given the extremis of our current situation, I consider this irresponsible. It’s like telling a story set in 1943 where the characters travel all over Europe and there’s no World War II.
My second sociopolitical concern isn’t in response to a silence but to lack of development of a very interesting insertion.
About midway through the book, the military cell Unute is working with goes to Africa and murders a group of “Sankarites and Lumumbites” in order to steal an artifact they have, connected to Unute (pp. 155-156 in the hard cover 1st ed.).
Now, throughout the novel, this military cell is not portrayed as simplistic “good guys”; neither is Unute. Both are implicated in significant harm; they’re “gray.” As to this scene itself, Unute does question the underlying ethics:
“Why do you think they [the military commanders] bother lying...? You know the Sankarites and Lumumbites don’t work with the Salafis[*]... And they [the “brass”] know you’d obey orders without them conjuring up some bogeyman Islamosocialism. And they know I’ll help them if they help me [find mortality]. So why? It’s like they think they’re just supposed to lie, that that’s less undignified than just telling you to kill some reds because they say so.”
His interlocuter starts to say, “My country right or...,” probably ironically, when they all leap down to begin murdering people (155).
The rest is just an action scene of shooting and stealing the artifact. The scene is never mentioned again.
That paragraph is enough to show that the writers were aware this action wasn’t morally pure, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of what these characters are actually doing. Sankara and Lumumba are martyrs whose assassination seems to have been arranged/abetted by the Western nations in order to stop their attempts to free their nations--and Africa broadly--from economic colonial exploitation (of the kind it still suffers under). I make no claim they were perfect men or perfect leaders, but they are symbols of justice, democracy, and anti-racism.
I have to give Reeves and Miéville credit for even bothering to mention them. I confess with embarrassment that I had never heard of Patrice Lumumba (prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) till this book, and I had never seen Thomas Sankara (president of Burkina Faso) mentioned in fiction till this book. (And I only knew about Sankara thanks to graduate studies in degrowth economics.) This all says something about the appalling nature of my Western education, so, yes, credit to Reeves and Miéville for breaking the wall of silence, even marginally.
That said, this chink in the wall is very ideologically revealing.
If this story were Star Wars: A New Hope, it would go something like this: Luke’s family comes into possession of some droids that have information about how the Sith can extend life. Some stormtroopers (our heroes) burn up the farm, Owen, Beru, and maybe Luke too, who, hating the Empire, might offer some ineffectual resistance. Then, the stormtroopers take the droids, and the rest of the story involves the Emperor, Vader, and their compatriots trying to figure out how the droid’s information relates to Sith longevity.
If it were Les Misérables, it would be something like Tholomyes and some of his friends ambush Fantine and steal back the necklace he gave her because it has a clue to a treasure map. The rest of the story involves their search for the treasure.
The text’s microscopic dose of colonial context reminds me a little bit of the Babylon 5 episode that features the news reporters working under Earth’s authoritarian government, spouting propaganda for virtually all of the news broadcast before working in one tiny line of quasi-sympathy for our rebel heroes as the only resistance they feel empowered to offer. Except Reeves and Miéville don’t live (yet) under authoritarian governments that will kill them or jail them for speaking out, so they don’t really have that excuse.
This passage is a stark illustration of the depth of Western Civiliation's racism, classism, and sense of imperial entitlement—and I do lay this at the hands of the whole civilization, not Reeves and Miéville as individuals. I am just as implicated as they are.
In terms of narrative craft, I totally buy that neither Unute nor his companions would question these orders (more than Unute actually does). The soldiers are trained not to. Unute has seen too much to have a strong reaction to any given injustice. But here are a couple ways this incident could have been taken more seriously: 1) devote one of the many chapters from the POV of people Unute has met to the life of one of the men killed in this attack. 2) Pick a different character--perhaps the somewhat kinder, gentler Diana--to offer commentary on how truly horrifying this incident is.
* I know nothing about the Salafi movement but what Wikipedia tells me, which is that it is a lot more complex than this line suggests, with only one subset supporting armed action, which makes this line feel like a cheap smear.
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
I think the book really succeeds in crafting the protagonist, Unute. At 80,000 years old, he may be the oldest basically human character I’ve encountered (well, minus of the memories of the preborn in the Dune verse). That’s a tremendously long time, maybe a third(ish) of the whole history of modern Homo sapiens, and the book does a good job of expressing that. I like the idea that civilizations have risen and fallen far more often that we modern folk think: including the development of writing, horse riding, even fairly advanced technology (ex. gun powder) several times. Though this isn’t archaeologically evidenced in real life, there’s still a lot we don’t know, and looking across a times pan about 15 times longer than recorded history, it makes sense there’d be a lot of weirdness we can’t guess at.
Most of Unute’s life has been spent among peoples whose names, languages, and societies are completely erased by time. He’s hung out with other species of hominids before their extinction. He’s spent many years in parts of the world prior to human migration as the only human there. Though this is a story mostly grounded in our everyday world (not a fantasy really), he’s seen—and embodies—a lot of weirdness that defies our science’s explanations. That all comes across well, building him into a character who (like Leto II) has experienced most things before, is rarely surprised, and takes almost everything in stride.
I like the idea that across his life he’s done just about everything: he’s been “good,” “bad,” rich, poor, acted as a god, devil, ordinary person, been aloof, been cruel, been kind, been commitment-averse, been committed to partners till they die of old age, been careful, been careless, and so on. At the same time, I don’t think this is the only possible trajectory for someone in his position. Another might be moving toward a kind of Buddha consciousness, which is a more the model followed in The Man from Earth (a mere 15,000 years old). This gives Unute something of his own personality and approach to life while keeping his experience generally plausible for someone of his age.
He also goes into fugue states in which he commits superhuman levels of violence against whatever is around him. He can be killed but his remains form an egg or cocoon out of which he hatches again, as an adult. He is joined in this strange existence—apparently conjured by a mother praying to the lightning to have an extraordinary child—by a pig almost as old as he is, who he has been crossing paths with periodically for, say, 75,000 years.
The pig is very well depicted. Part of the special powers that come with this existence, at least for Unute, is a perfect memory. Pig memory might be a bit different, but it seems the pig mostly shares this characteristic. At least, it changes a lot over the years, for example, from not responding much to Unute to virulently hating him/attacking him. It’s not a POV character, which I like, because who knows how a pig would think? It is really a pig; it doesn’t speak or anything. At the same time, it’s a super-pig with 75,000 years of pig life experience, which makes it a unique character, well realized.
Less well realized is the other super-“sibling,” Vayn, a woman who is also a human/“lightning” hybrid. She’s not a bad character per se, but like Ghanima in the Dune books, she’s just not used much. This is a missed opportunity in both stories, I think. Were I to suggest a way to get more power out of The Book of Elsewhere’s plot, I might have oriented it around the incident (in the book) where Unute, for very understandable reasons, drives Vayn away. He could have really regretted this later because it could have been his last chance to have the companionship of a non-pig individual like him. A few ten thousands of years go past, and he’s convinced she’s really gone—if not dead, then never coming back. And while he’ll go on fairly calmly, this could have been a lasting wound. Then, she could have come back. That might have packed a bit more punch. It might also have addressed the book's tendency to trivialize women, not intentionally or grossly, just in the grand old tradition of mostly not exploring what could be interesting about them (see Ghanima).
A few gripes:
The titular book is not in the story enough to deserve to be the title. I get that its ultimate insignificance is part of the point, but it could have been made to initially seem significant.
The ending is weak, not only because of weak plotting but little thematic exploration. The story sets up the idea that Unute is a force of Death and Vayn is a force of Life, and life is inimical to death and wants to destroy it... and no one really remarks, “Is life inimical to death though?” What would that mean? This is an obvious philosophical question. Stories about the ill consequences of trying to thwart death go back to ancient times, yet everyone seems to accept that Life and Death are obvious opponents. Then, this frame abruptly (and with little setup that I saw) shifts to Change vs. Stillness/Entropy. Same thing. Why are these inimical? No one really asks. This shift is treated as the story’s big revelation, but it feels to me like just substituting one broad, unexplored allegory for another.
Still in all, I enjoyed it and found it different and through provoking, two things I find increasingly rare in my reading and appreciate a lot.
Two Sociopolitical Critiques
It’s often said that there’s no such thing as an apolitical position on issues in cultural dispute. For example, never discussing race in an ensemble TV show set in modern America is not racially apolitical but a political move (intentionally or not) that obscures racialization as an organizational principle in the US. This book reads to me as an attempt to be “apolitical” that assumes a political valence through its silences.
Unute remarks at several points that he rarely encounters anything new. You know what would be new? The climate emergency.
The emergency we are current living through is categorically different from anything Unute would have observed in 80,000 years—wildly, almost unimaginably different. Yet this book seems to exist in a parallel universe where this ecological collapse isn’t happening, as it is never remarked upon once. Given the extremis of our current situation, I consider this irresponsible. It’s like telling a story set in 1943 where the characters travel all over Europe and there’s no World War II.
My second sociopolitical concern isn’t in response to a silence but to lack of development of a very interesting insertion.
About midway through the book, the military cell Unute is working with goes to Africa and murders a group of “Sankarites and Lumumbites” in order to steal an artifact they have, connected to Unute (pp. 155-156 in the hard cover 1st ed.).
Now, throughout the novel, this military cell is not portrayed as simplistic “good guys”; neither is Unute. Both are implicated in significant harm; they’re “gray.” As to this scene itself, Unute does question the underlying ethics:
“Why do you think they [the military commanders] bother lying...? You know the Sankarites and Lumumbites don’t work with the Salafis[*]... And they [the “brass”] know you’d obey orders without them conjuring up some bogeyman Islamosocialism. And they know I’ll help them if they help me [find mortality]. So why? It’s like they think they’re just supposed to lie, that that’s less undignified than just telling you to kill some reds because they say so.”
His interlocuter starts to say, “My country right or...,” probably ironically, when they all leap down to begin murdering people (155).
The rest is just an action scene of shooting and stealing the artifact. The scene is never mentioned again.
That paragraph is enough to show that the writers were aware this action wasn’t morally pure, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of what these characters are actually doing. Sankara and Lumumba are martyrs whose assassination seems to have been arranged/abetted by the Western nations in order to stop their attempts to free their nations--and Africa broadly--from economic colonial exploitation (of the kind it still suffers under). I make no claim they were perfect men or perfect leaders, but they are symbols of justice, democracy, and anti-racism.
I have to give Reeves and Miéville credit for even bothering to mention them. I confess with embarrassment that I had never heard of Patrice Lumumba (prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) till this book, and I had never seen Thomas Sankara (president of Burkina Faso) mentioned in fiction till this book. (And I only knew about Sankara thanks to graduate studies in degrowth economics.) This all says something about the appalling nature of my Western education, so, yes, credit to Reeves and Miéville for breaking the wall of silence, even marginally.
That said, this chink in the wall is very ideologically revealing.
If this story were Star Wars: A New Hope, it would go something like this: Luke’s family comes into possession of some droids that have information about how the Sith can extend life. Some stormtroopers (our heroes) burn up the farm, Owen, Beru, and maybe Luke too, who, hating the Empire, might offer some ineffectual resistance. Then, the stormtroopers take the droids, and the rest of the story involves the Emperor, Vader, and their compatriots trying to figure out how the droid’s information relates to Sith longevity.
If it were Les Misérables, it would be something like Tholomyes and some of his friends ambush Fantine and steal back the necklace he gave her because it has a clue to a treasure map. The rest of the story involves their search for the treasure.
The text’s microscopic dose of colonial context reminds me a little bit of the Babylon 5 episode that features the news reporters working under Earth’s authoritarian government, spouting propaganda for virtually all of the news broadcast before working in one tiny line of quasi-sympathy for our rebel heroes as the only resistance they feel empowered to offer. Except Reeves and Miéville don’t live (yet) under authoritarian governments that will kill them or jail them for speaking out, so they don’t really have that excuse.
This passage is a stark illustration of the depth of Western Civiliation's racism, classism, and sense of imperial entitlement—and I do lay this at the hands of the whole civilization, not Reeves and Miéville as individuals. I am just as implicated as they are.
In terms of narrative craft, I totally buy that neither Unute nor his companions would question these orders (more than Unute actually does). The soldiers are trained not to. Unute has seen too much to have a strong reaction to any given injustice. But here are a couple ways this incident could have been taken more seriously: 1) devote one of the many chapters from the POV of people Unute has met to the life of one of the men killed in this attack. 2) Pick a different character--perhaps the somewhat kinder, gentler Diana--to offer commentary on how truly horrifying this incident is.
* I know nothing about the Salafi movement but what Wikipedia tells me, which is that it is a lot more complex than this line suggests, with only one subset supporting armed action, which makes this line feel like a cheap smear.
