Keanu Reeves Literature | Blood, Muscles, and a Little Magic

Do you know the muscle-bound fighter Unute? He's 80,000 years old, half-god, half-human, and lives in a comic book called "BRZRKR." That's "Berzerker" without the vowels. He was created by Hollywood acting icon Keanu Reeves, who, together with comic book greats Matt Kindt and Ron Garney, released twelve volumes of the series from 2021 to 2023 – to great acclaim. Netflix reportedly has both an anime series and a live-action film adaptation in the works.

Now, "Matrix" star Keanu Reeves, together with successful British science fiction and fantasy author China Miéville, has turned the material into a novel: "The Book Elsewhere." The mainstream media was very impressed. This is clearly due to Keanu Reeves' celebrity status and the fact that the Canadian co-wrote a book with Trotskyist Miéville, whom he calls one of his favorite authors. For large parts of this bloodthirsty splatter-action spectacle about a pre-Neolithic warrior who goes into battle for a US special unit, it's hardly compatible with the otherwise mostly high-culture-oriented feature pages.

Especially in this country, science fiction and fantasy eke out a rather miserable existence in the cultural landscape. China Miéville does, however, get quite a bit out of the material. Things get particularly exciting when it goes back to history. "The Book Elsewhere" takes place on multiple timescales. For example, Unute regularly fights a babirusa, which is constantly being reborn.

Unute is stationed with various scientists and military personnel at a top-secret research facility near Portland, where Unute and his troops are suddenly attacked. Who is behind this? Perhaps even a millennia-old cult intent on finally wiping out the warrior?

The fascinating thing about this story is undoubtedly the idea that a human being, even one with almost supernatural powers, has lived through millennia of human history. And, if you follow the two authors, this history is full of cultural periods we don't even know about. Whether it's agriculture, writing, technology, religious movements, violent uprisings, or mighty empires: this fiction contains far more buried in the past than we can imagine. A central question, of course, is how a being like Unute can live so long. An archaeologist named Caldwell and a biologist named Diana Ahuja attempt to unravel this. At first, they are Unute's colleagues, but then they become antagonists.

The book is set in the present day USA, in ancient Asia, or in declining kingdoms of the late Middle Ages. The character of Unute, who then engages in long, sometimes somewhat simplistic philosophical conversations with Diana Ahuja, is somewhat reminiscent of a cross between Conan the Barbarian and the Hulk. Just like the green Marvel hero, Unute experiences aggressive outbursts; his eyes begin to glow, and then everything falls apart, no matter where he hits, punching his way through building walls or tearing people to pieces as if they were papier-mâché figures.

As blandly as this novel reproduces the aesthetics of male violence as a colorful pop spectacle, the over 500-page novel certainly manages to fascinate dramatically through its many twists, turns, secrets, and conspiracies. However, it is not truly political, as in China Miéville's anti-fascist novel "The Last Days of New Paris" (2019), an explicitly literary contribution against the global right-wing mobilization. It dutifully follows the internal logic of fantasy action genre literature.

China Miéville / Keanu Reves: The Book Elsewhere. Translated from English by Jakob Schmidt, Gutkind-Verlag, 525 pp., €24.