The acclaimed British ‘weird fiction’ author Miéville has stepped in to spin off his take on Reeves’s unstoppable (but inevitably sensitive, world-weary and introspective) brand of killing machine
Keanu Reeves has, over the last 20 years, managed to create a sort of ur-character that has become his only product: the stoic everyman (but with mysterious depths), dragged reluctantly into ultraviolent conflicts that never really seem to end. Maybe now, heading into his sixties, Reeves is finding that it’s getting a bit much. So he created an avatar, in the form of the BRZRKR comic series: about a seventy-thousand-year-old warrior who can’t die without being reborn and who happens to look exactly like Reeves.
There’s going to be a Netflix anime adaptation. And a live-action movie. In the interim, acclaimed British ‘weird fiction’ author China Miéville has stepped in to spin off his take on Reeves’s unstoppable (but inevitably sensitive, world-weary and introspective) killing machine. Miéville has clearly enjoyed the challenge, exploiting the comic’s dilated historical space between our hero’s current gig with a US ultrasecret special-ops unit and his earlier lives. Ladling in his own erudite predilections for occult lore and gnostic historical knowledge, Miéville ruminates on science, magic, the possibility of gods and the meaning of life and death. All the while conjuring characteristically vivid scenes of gore-drenched battle and grotesque biotech horror. It’s a breathless ride, even if Miéville seems content to pastiche styles of sci-fi prose. It’s the compromise of working to another’s brief. And there’s more than a hint of the sense that this is more about Reeves than anything else: the actor comfortably typecast forever. He kills, he dies, he comes back.
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville. Del Rey, £22 (hardcover)
