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A review by noel_b
The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville, Keanu Reeves
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This was an enjoyable book but as someone who loves China Mieville, it was also a disappointment.
Mieville's skill and inventiveness are still there, but you can almost feel him straining against the premise itself. I have not read the BZRKR comics because the concept is really boring to me: An immortal man who is really stoic and good at violence but feels kinda sad about it. He mostly feels bored and tired and wants to die.
...how daring.
I think in the end the fundamental problem of a character like "B" is that by virtue of being immortal, there's no physical stakes to anything that happens to him. And by virtue of being so detached from everything, there's no emotional stakes either. If your character's defining trait is that he's bored.... you'll make a boring story. I can't get emotionally invested in anything that the main character has no emotional investment on. To make things even harder for any author: B's only goal is to be mortal again. Unfortunately, he's a comic book character from a still running comic book series, so there's absolutely no chance that he would end this book being mortal.
If anyone was going to make this premise interesting to me it would have been China Mieville, but unfortunately he never quite managed it.
By far the most enjoyable bits of the book were the vignettes in between the "main" plot, of B's previous lives or things he did in the past. These vignettes are often from the point of view of other characters, people that he briefly had in his life. They're self-contained and reflective, and they're all different and creative in a way that the "main" plot never has room to be.
All in all, I didn't hate this book, it was enjoyable enough and Mieville's prose does a lot of heavy lifting here. But I don't think I'll be rereading it, and it did not make me want to pick up Reeve's comic.
If this is your first time reading China Mieville: welcome! It gets weirder and wilder, please explore more of his works, they're fun.
Mieville's skill and inventiveness are still there, but you can almost feel him straining against the premise itself. I have not read the BZRKR comics because the concept is really boring to me: An immortal man who is really stoic and good at violence but feels kinda sad about it. He mostly feels bored and tired and wants to die.
...how daring.
I think in the end the fundamental problem of a character like "B" is that by virtue of being immortal, there's no physical stakes to anything that happens to him. And by virtue of being so detached from everything, there's no emotional stakes either. If your character's defining trait is that he's bored.... you'll make a boring story. I can't get emotionally invested in anything that the main character has no emotional investment on. To make things even harder for any author: B's only goal is to be mortal again. Unfortunately, he's a comic book character from a still running comic book series, so there's absolutely no chance that he would end this book being mortal.
If anyone was going to make this premise interesting to me it would have been China Mieville, but unfortunately he never quite managed it.
By far the most enjoyable bits of the book were the vignettes in between the "main" plot, of B's previous lives or things he did in the past. These vignettes are often from the point of view of other characters, people that he briefly had in his life. They're self-contained and reflective, and they're all different and creative in a way that the "main" plot never has room to be.
All in all, I didn't hate this book, it was enjoyable enough and Mieville's prose does a lot of heavy lifting here. But I don't think I'll be rereading it, and it did not make me want to pick up Reeve's comic.
If this is your first time reading China Mieville: welcome! It gets weirder and wilder, please explore more of his works, they're fun.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore