The warrior who cannot die is a recurring figure in science fiction and fantasy. Dying, after all, is what a warrior is meant to do, usefully and heroically. He earns his legacy through both his own death and those he brings to others. So the warrior who cannot find rest, but must fight on endlessly no matter how many times the war around him changes, is a fun little concept.
As we once had Highlander and Corporal Cuckoo, we now have The Book of Elsewhere, a collaborative novel by actor Keanu Reeves and science-fiction writer China Miéville. Their immortal soldier is known as “B”. He can’t be killed, but he can be hurt, as Reeves and Miéville establish in their very first scene: someone tries to take him out with a suicide bomb, and though it blows him apart, it somehow leaves him alive. A witness “glimpsed spine through the burned cave where the man’s chest had been. Saw the motion of innards, like fish troubled by light.”
B’s immortality is a curse: he wants to die. So he goes on a journey, seeking the death that seems to find other people all too easily. The US government, luckily, is happy to help him with his death-wish – that is, if he completes one final mission for them, which involves tracking down a former colleague who should be dead, but is mysteriously not. (If America can crack the mystery of immortality, their “forever wars” will take on a whole new meaning.) B complies, only to discover how limited his understanding of his own existence, and his involvement in this plot, really is.
If you think this sounds like the synopsis of an action film, or comic book, or video-game – yes. The character B originates in the BZRKR comic series, which Reeves began writing with cartoonist Matt Kindt in 2021. In the comic’s artwork, and now in Elsewhere’s endpapers, B looks an awful lot like the celebrity half of both writing duos, which was convenient for any Hollywood executives wanting to imagine how a film adaptation might look. And thanks to – who else – Netflix, BZRKR adaptations for both TV and film are in the works.
B is particularly similar to Reeves’s recurring film character John Wick: they share a nonverbal menace, and the capacity to bleed and burn yet remain unsettlingly hard to kill. To be clear, this isn’t a complaint: one of Reeves’s strengths as an actor is that you can never see him thinking, so it’s easy to assume he isn’t. When John Wick goes on a mission of bloodshed and revenge, he’s thrillingly scary, like human will divorced from intellect – just a machine of id and fists.
