I give up. It took me 11 days to get to 48%. The book is supposed to have 352pp, but I'm certain I've read more than 600pp already. I liked the GN, but I'm no fan of the novel with all the tangents, different POVs and endless dialogue.

This might be a good novel, but I don't have the patience.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me. IPad trouble working out what was happening and the writing was often disjointed and did make sense.

Unfortunately this book was a NRN, this may because of the format, I will try this again with a physical copy once it is published.

In this mind-blowing epic, Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books, deliver a unique and innovative narrative. The story follows "B," a warrior who cannot die and has witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations. Desiring mortality, B is promised by a U.S. black-ops group that they can help him achieve death—if he helps them in return.

However, when a mortal soldier inexplicably returns to life, it hints at a mysterious force as powerful as B, with its own agenda. Combining Miéville’s singular style and creativity with Reeves’s haunting narrative, The Book of Elsewhere is a genre-bending masterpiece that intertwines sci-fi, fantasy, parascience, history, and action. This philosophical, violent thriller explores identity, existence, and the meaning of mortality with elegance and introspection.

I won't lie, I picked up this title based on my curiousity of Keanu Reeves as an author, and also having read and enjoyed China Mieville's writing before. This was a weird but fun story with some highlights. It was definitely an interesting read.

This was weird but also quite fun. I find Mieville's writing hard at times and this was no exception. I enjoyed it for what it was but it's not a favourite.

I was so intrigued by this book, being a big fan of Keanu Reeves. Buuuut, unfortunately I just couldn't get into it. The prose felt a little clunky and messy, and there were so many characters introduced without time to instill them in my mind so it became very confusing to differentiate between characters. Perhaps you need to read the comic book it's based on go get into it, but I hadn't so unfortunately dnf'd before finishing.

As a longtime mega fan of China Miéville's work, this pains me to say, but I really don't think this came together well. That is not to say that there aren't still many examples of the trademark Miéville magic, with beautiful, winding description and unique and compelling concepts stretching over millennia, charting the life of 'B', Keanu Reeve's self-insert action protagonist. Unfortunately, it is through this character that the manuscript struggles most. Even Keanu's biggest supporters would have to admit that his characters can be bland and repetitious, and that is very much the case here. Combine that with a narrative that meanders from place to place, time period to time period without constraint, and the overarching emotion after completing The Book of Elsewhere is exhaustion. Some great highs, but a slog nonetheless.

Whilst many readers are likely to opt to read this co-written novel because of the actor Keanu Reeves, I did so for China Mieville, but in all honesty, I struggled with this, finding it chaotic, strange, and bizarre, and hard to make sense of. I understand it draws on the world of Reeves BRZRKR comics with which I am unfamiliar. It is thought provoking, non-linear, sometimes engaging, and philosophical, featuring the legendery and immortal B, Unute, living for thousands of years, tired of never being able to die. A US black ops group offers to help him with this, if he helps them. But then a human soldier does what cannot be forseen, coming back to life. The super hero aspects of this brutal and violent narrative appealed less to me, but what I did appreciate was the wonderful writing. I have no doubt there will be other readers who will love this more than me, so please read other reviews when making a decision to read this. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

China Mieville gets parachuted in to juice up Keanu Reeve’s self-insert immortal berserker mega-franchise and how is that even a sentence you can write, never mind a book you can review? Unsurprisingly the resulting Book of Elsewhere is a (fascinating) train wreck, the literary equivalent of Marvel poaching Gaspar Noe, careening between dour superhero tropes, wry self-mockery, and digressive, inventive asides that often feel more lived-in than the main story. I’d rather have an actual Mieville novel, or at least one not contractually obligated to hit pre-approved plot beats, but there’s just enough of the Weird here to elevate it above more rote IP exercises.

Even if it’s not (yet) a movie, it’s very hard not to read The Book of Elsewhere without visualising Keanu in it, as it’s so very obviously written to his on-screen persona: the modern day version of our protagonist, Unute, is still, contemplative, capable of sudden and unstoppable violence, and exactly as blank-yet-capable as every Reeves action character from Thomas Anderson to John Wick. Mieville doesn’t stray too far from the limited range of this Ur-Keanu, but he fits in some intriguing asides in the space he has to work with. Most interesting is the Nietzchean idea that given enough time, a person would eventually become all things: past versions of Unute have been lovers, abusers, dilettantes, kings, conquerors, and genocidaires, making his present Keanu-blankness less a default state and more the inevitable consequence of having literally done it all before at some point in the last 80,000 years. Of course, modern history suggests that most of what Unute would have been doing for those trackless ages is hunting and gathering. But having introduced an immortal demigod already, the story isn’t too fussed about tossing out physics, anthropology, and geography as the plot demands. It’s a refreshingly unapologetic approach, but having told us to forget what we know, Mieville could have swapped in a little more worldbuilding than the allusive but vague grab-bag we get of Mu and Atlantis and magic and dragons and…killer, Unute-hating pigs?

In fact, the killer pig is a brilliant touch, a comically violent way of refracting Unute’s own immortal predicament back at him, but it does point to the essential silliness of franchise plotting. I mean, one of the book’s central mysteries has a final-pages answer that’s so amazingly bathetic that I had to stop and check twice I wasn’t missing something. And of course, coming mere pages after the puddle-deep revelation that the colour of your magic powers tells you whose side you’re really on, there’s nothing to be missed. I don’t necessarily blame Mieville for this — it’s hard not to read the emptiness of the book’s mysteries as deliberate, especially put alongside other self-mocking moments like Unute’s reduction of a tacticool pile of arms to “gun, stick, knife, gun”. But intentional or not, the narrative choices are still unsatisfying, and too often seem to be just setup for the inevitable sequel. No wonder poor Unute is such a burnt-out shell: 80,000 years of Hollywood superhero antics would tire even the most inexhaustible immortal.

I was not planning on enjoying this book and to be honest the first chapter nearly dissuaded me. It felt confusing and the language didn't seem to flow.
Still hold on in there.
It was good. It has the usual complex ideas, but that is the joy of Mieville, you have to just wait in a mess of the muddy waters until the story clears.
I am still puzzled as to deeper meanings but it works and I would definitely read a follow on.

Readers be warned, this book takes no prisoners.

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville have created a world with histories, characters, plots and futures that, at times, I really struggled to understand. It's a narrative that enjoys keeping you at arm's length - never fully explaining itself, never working too hard to connect the dots for you, never letting the ground solidify beneath you. There were sections where I had no idea what was happening and in places the chapters read more like short stories, adjacent to the main plot.

Having read other reviews, I can see how naive I was going into this book, thinking it would be a Keanu Reeves action film in prose. That is not what The Book of Elsewhere is.

Taking root in a science fiction foundation, the novel meanders through several thousands of years as the main character, Unute, expounds pages of carefully considered thoughts on religion, humanity and what it means to be alive. If you enjoy a complex narrative and are willing to surrender to it, then this might be the book for you. It just wasn't for me at this time.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I found the prologue a bit muddling. But then I found the book like this on a whole. This is NOT to say this is badly written, the exact opposite the book is written in this way for a reason. This is not an easy beach read and to truly apricate it it should not be treated as such. This is a deep dive into science fiction read, with multiple timelines, with different storylines emerging in several different patterns but then it will all click. I understand some people may struggle with this but on the plus side B is basically Keanu and if he hasn't written it you would see him in your head. I felt for B and his character, he doesn't know who he is or why he is, but then out of the blue there is someone like him and everything changes... keep going to the end it will be worth it.

Description:
Unute is an ancient, deathless super-soldier, desperately lonely and trying to figure out how to attain mortality.

Liked:
An interesting concept, with history which plays out nicely. I enjoyed following one age-old character through lots of different epochs, in fragments and vignettes. There are also some beautiful little descriptive turns of phrase which are truly a joy to encounter.

Disliked:
Oh man, this book is hard work. I've read a lot, and fairly widely, and I had to make a fairly substantial list of words to look up (sastrugi, stochastic, solecism, riastrid, telos, tendentious, nidus, vorago and quiddity, for the interested!). If this had been it, fine, I'll consider myself educated I guess, but the novel resists the reader in so many ways. Chapters are split three ways between present day (itself following a multitude of characters, and not always clear up front which one we're with now), following Unute's past adventures (using second-person), and in interviews with folks who've known him over the years (written as if a conversation with an unknown interviewer). The present-day is by far the least interesting, with a standard military wrapper, complex little web of deceptions and experiments, and characters it’s profoundly difficult to feel anything at all for. Ultimately, the resolution did not feel worth the work. Which is a shame, because I've really loved some of Mieville's other novels.

Read this if you’re prepared to suffer a bit for some gorgeous bits of language and a very Matrix-y main character.

Anything Else:
VERY curious to learn about how the work was split, for this. Hoping they’ll talk a bit about their process when it comes to promotion!

I really like Keanu Reeves as an actor and as a creative person. And I’ve heard great things about China Miéville. So, this is very subjective view: I couldn’t get into the book and found it too dark to finish. Having said that, I feel that there will be readers who’ll love its unique style and storytelling, especially since it is based on Reeves’s BRZRKR comics which has a devoted following. Thank you for the arc, PRH and Netgalley!

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville collaborate on a book inspired by the BRZRKR comic books. The story of 'The Book of Elsewhere' centers on B, an immortal warrior who has witnessed countless civilizations' rise and fall and now yearns for death. In modern times, a U.S. black-ops team promises to fulfill his wish if he assists them. However, the resurrection of a mortal soldier hints at a mysterious and powerful new force with its own agenda.

This book was confusing in the exact same way that 'Harrow the Ninth' from Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb series is confusing. I've come to the conclusion that while a lot of readers enjoy this complex, cerebral style of book that you have to reread several times to really understand, I prefer something more accessible and easy to understand the first time through. I can't have an emotional connection to the plot or the characters if I can't follow what's happening and unfortunately that's what happened here.

Having not read the 'BRZRKR' comics or anything by China Miéville before, maybe this just wasn't a good entry point for me. At least with 'Harrow the Ninth', I'd built a connection with the main character as part of the first book, 'Gideon the Ninth' so I was already invested and had a reason to persevere even though I was confused. Unfortunately here, I didn't have chance to build an emotional connection to any characters because I was instantly confused, so I didn't have that encouragement to stay engaged in the story.

I think this will be a very divisive book - there'll be readers who love it and find it wildly creative and original and there'll be readers like me who just find it too much like hard work to read. I might have had a different experience if I'd read the comics first but I think the logic-puzzle nature of it would have still taken me out of the story.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley but this is my voluntary and honest review.

An interesting meditation on what it would be like to never die.

I'm always a fan of stories about two people who utterly hate each other over the long years of their lives. Imagine Ridley Scott's THE DUELISTS but over eighty thousand years.

Mieville and Reeves have conjured a fascinating character in Unute. He talks above how somebody might only have another sixty years if they don't get killed then and there so why should he care? That's a blink to a man who's millennia old. But by the same token, what is a millennium to geological time?

I enjoyed the hints about extinct civilisations. Entire nations and peoples unknown to the rest of the planet, lost completely to history only to be mentioned in passing and then never again. What a legacy.

It took me a while to get with the shape of things in the book but that's just how Mieville writes, and it's as much on me than anything. There's a special joy to being dropped into something with minimal explanation and having to join the dots yourself.

This was a brilliant introduction to Reeves writing, although Mieville shines through. I'm excited to see where this all goes!

“You have been walking for a long time. You have been walking for no time at all. Something and its opposite can both be true.”

Keanu Reeves and China Mieville in this genre bending novel introduce us to the complicated life of B. He is a warrior who became a legend. He has lived for decades, witnessing many civilisations rise and fall. He’s an immortal who now wishes to be able to die. A U.S. black-ops group has promised to give him what he wants as log as he can help them out first. However that does not happen so easily for B.

The minute I heard Keanu Reeves was writing a book I knew I would pick it up the first chance I got.

This novel is set in the same world as his graphic novel series Brzrkr. It was easy to visualise the character of B as Keanu, much like his films were there is a lot going on, several twists and a lot to keep tabs on, this book does take the reader into an extraordinary world that is beyond science fiction and weird fiction.

It begins straight into the action, it does take a while to piece together what has been going on and to what end this bizarre journey will take these characters.

This book will leave some readers torn. It’s not straight forward, there is a lot to keep tabs on, patience at times is needed but worth it once you get to the end.

Although it took me a wee bit to get into it I did enjoy this book.

The Book of Elsewhere is a novel about a man who cannot die whose quest for a mortal life turns into something far more complex. B has been known by many names and guises, and as a warrior who cannot die, but now he's looking for a mortal conclusion. An American black-ops group wants his help and in return, they'll help him, even though the devastation he can cause sows discord. When one of the soldiers suddenly comes back to life, it seems that the previous logic of B's existence is more complicated, and there might be another force after something.

Just the very fact of the two authors will draw people into this novel, as it did me (mostly asking "what on earth must that be like?"). As reviews have already pointed out, this is not an easy book: it immediately pushes you into the world without mercy or explanation, there's a range of interludes that even afterwards you can't always be sure about, and the writing style is definitely on the literary end of sci-fi. However, being braced for this difficulty going in, I actually found The Book of Elsewhere far more readable than I was expecting. Sure, there were sections where I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but I don't read that much sci-fi anyway because I don't like confusing world-building, so I wasn't going in expecting to get every moment and plot point.

Given Keanu Reeves' involvement, it was impossible not to picture B as the actor, but for me that made it easier to engage with the character's story quickly, without needing to build up a picture of him. I'm aware that the character comes from Reeves' comic books, but I didn't necessarily feel like I needed more knowledge of the character, particularly as the novel is meditative and not really about action (there are a few action sequences, but not many). The other characters were at times forgettable, but by the end I felt like I understood everyone's place in the narrative.

This is a book that has the existentialism of immortality sci-fi, the timeline-playfulness of literary historical fiction, and the memorable main character of John Wick, combined into something that is sometimes confusing, pretty gripping, and generally much more of an enjoyable read that I was expecting.