Should you read Keanu Reeves’s novel?
In case you missed it: Keanu Reeves has published a novel.
Yes, it’s true: the internet’s boyfriend has teamed up with China Miéville, one of the great speculative fiction writers of all time, to produce a novel set in the world of BRZRKR—the comic book series he also created—and we here at Literary Hub have been getting some questions about the whole thing. Questions like: “wait seriously?” and “but is it going to be any good?” and “is this really what we should be paying attention to right now?”
To those particular questions, I have answers: yes, yes, and yes.
But that still doesn’t answer the question of whether or not you should read this book—and so, in order to help decide whether you should invest your time, dollars, and imagination into The Book of Elsewhere, I’ve put together this short survey.
1. Are you a Keanu Reeves fan? If no… ???
2. Did you already know who China Miéville is before you clicked on this post? If yes, let’s not fool ourselves: you’ve already pre-ordered this book and I can promise you that that was a good choice.
3. Do you prefer action-Keanu or rom-com-Keanu? If the latter, I might suggest you re-watch Always Be My Maybe or even Much Ado About Nothing instead.
4. Do you like your action movies with a dose of philosophy, or would you rather it just be pedal-to-the-metal fighting? If the former, you’re going to love this book—Sigmund Freud puts in an appearance and characters frequently debate the nature of existence, the ethics and morality of warfare, Marxism, and the cost of inherited trauma, among many other heady ideas.
5. Was the pencil assault in John Wick Chapter Two metal as hell or a bit too far? If the latter, steel yourself: the novel opens with a pretty horrific act of terrorism and the main character is also an 80,000 year old immortal warrior currently working for a black ops facet of the US security complex so… he gets up to some gnarly stuff.
6. Do you need orderly storytelling, moral clarity, and clear resolutions in your narratives? There’s nothing tidy about this book by any metric—but then again, the same can be said about life.
7. If you were an immortal warrior and you discovered that the only other immortal creature on the planet was a babirusa, would you befriend it or would it be your nemesis? If this whole question makes you scratch your head, maybe move along—but if it intrigues you, do I have some good news for you!
On the celebrity-novel scale, The Book of Elsewhere stands well above pulpy cash-grabs like the Clintons’ co-written thrillers (to say nothing of the likes of Jake Tapper and James Comey) and it makes a better case for itself than the often-mediocre-at-best “sure why not?” novels and stories from prestige actors like Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks. If it doesn’t rise to the “this deserves to exist on its own merits” level of something like Shopgirl… well, plenty of non-celebrity novels don’t make it there either.
Bottom line: this is a weird-ass book, far stranger than any plot synopsis or review could ever do justice. If you love Keanu’s brand of action, you’ll love this. If you love Miéville’s brand of heady speculative fiction, you’ll love this. And if you’ve never really gotten into either… well, who knows? Maybe you’ll love this too.
