The Book of Elsewhere

April 29, 2024
Reeves’s collaboration with bestseller Miéville (The City and the City), based on the actor’s BRZRKR comic books, disappoints. The U.S. government’s secret Belief Systems and Ancient Technology Migration Unit is “dedicated to the collaboration with; study, decoding, and keeping secret of; questioning and protecting (laughable as that was) of; and performing necessary wetwork with an eighty-thousand-year-old warrior who would not die.” This immortal warrior is Unute, also known as B, who periodically loses his supernatural powers only to be reborn out of a large egg, and is eager to finally die. Diana Ahuja, who works with the Unit, investigates Unute’s connection with the Life Project, a shadowy organization premised on the idea that society needs to be weaned off its addiction to death. She gets a lead on the project’s members by searching the dark web for people who are “interested in ancient magic and who are also investigating the biology of echidnas and platypuses, and who are big fans of Solange Knowles and Millie Jackson, and who speak German and Polish and Farsi and who are very keen on baking.” That risible, random assortment of qualities is consistent with an overall tone that undercuts suspension of disbelief. Leaden writing (“Thereafter would come to her the fundamental rewritings of history and prehistory occasioned by her new subject”) doesn’t help. This is tedious.