Are you looking for a thrilling book? One that has action, style, philosophy, and perhaps gods?
Keanu Reeves, yes, that Keanu, and China Miéville have written The Book of Elsewhere: A Novel. It may be just what you need to escape the day-to-day.
From the inside cover:
“She said, We needed a tool. So I asked the gods.
There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.”
And he wants to be able to die.
In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.”
But here’s the key to this book: the reason I enjoyed it so much is that it doesn’t spoonfeed you. Authors Reeves and Miéville insert you into a world, and this is where you are when you open the pages of this novel. Picture the Corellian corvette being hunted by a Star Destroyer the first time you watch the original Star Wars, with no setup whatsoever, and you get the idea how this all starts.
Not everything is spelled out. Time jumps, and you will eventually figure out how it all connects, but they don’t tell you a story as if you can’t figure it out for yourself. In fact, this is something I find rare in modern contemporary fiction, especially from the last decade.
In that respect, this book is a revelation.
It doesn’t write down to you. It expects more of the reader -at least more than has been expected of me as a reader from most modern contemporary fiction.
It is an engaging thriller, not usually the type of book I tend to read, but it also questions itself and the world it inhabits without giving pause for an answer. Not every question has a satisfactory answer, after all. This I found absolutely refreshing.
It also contains trace passages of humor…
This particular passage was hilarious wordplay… “I and all the others of the house had been given to ready for a party. When the carriages arrived I knew not the visages of those within but from the whispers of the household did I learn that this was Sir Thus and this Lady So and this Dowager Et and that Lord Cetera, and so on in such manner.”
That’s not to say the book is light. It has a few heavy things throughout. Two differing examples being:
“Our culture is addicted to negativity, and that means being addicted to death. It’s a death culture. That’s what we have to break.”
“I’ve seen a sphinx. I’ve seen stone that walks. I’ve seen the pillars of Iram. But I’ve never seen a person who knows what they want.”
The second example above gave me a chuckle. But this is still an action thriller. Is it cinematic in those scenes? Perhaps, but you see it in your mind’s eye so well because there is just enough detail to describe the scene while not grinding the action to a halt. It’s a balance that I find noticeably admirable.
I don’t know who this book is for. I do know that it’s not what I normally read, and I found that very refreshing. If you’re looking for a change of pace from your normal reading and a book that doesn’t treat you like an idiot by a generally good-guy celebrity, move this from your B list to your A list.