The Book of Elsewhere
Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
Having read it
★★☆☆☆
Was looking forward to reading this and pleased I was able to get a copy of it from my local library after a successful digital search of their catalogue.
However, the weight of its authors’ names (and talents?) has seemingly helped create (and allow?) a predominately non-story, that had a few of the usual elements like narrative and characters but in a mishmash of words and chapters – that were read by me steadily for a hundred or so pages, then skipped and skimmed to just try and find out what was going on, beyond all its philosophising, then just reading the last few chapters to see how it ended – that really made it all seem a bit, well, lost and devoid of a point.
Maybe that was its point.
Who knows.
I don’t.
A good passage
What do you want, B? Diana couldn’t stop herself from recalling the first time she’d asked. To die?
He’d said, You’re not listening. You think you’re pretty cynical. But this isn’t a fairy story for you to be revisionist about. You don’t get to disabuse me, I don’t think I’m ‘the Boy Who Learned What Fear Was’. I know this isn’t ‘Koschei the Deathless’. What I want isn’t a moral. I don’t want to die. But I do want to be able to.
Death not as destination but as horizon. Not death up close. His desire not for the end but to continue not-ending in a quite new way. In the shadow of life’s culminating end. And if that was what he craved, wasn’t that, though he hadn’t said this to her either, to suggest that he was not, now, living? What could it be, to exist with the banality of endlessness?
A second good passage
Those voluble dissidents slammed the organization they had left, though not because of human sacrifice, of dread sciences or philosophies of terror, but because the convener in their branch had ignored their request to stock a different brand of coffee or to reschedule a meeting. She read two-star references to what one woman called ‘icky glassy-eyed kumbaya-ism’. But mostly, even those who mocked themselves for it stressed the comfort they found in the rah-rah repudiation of death.