I’m having a hard time believing it, but it’s been just over eight years since I last posted a review of a China Mieville story. He’s one of my favorite authors, as evidenced by the fact that we at Pixelated Geek have reviewed seven of his books over the years, along with name-dropping him every chance we get. So of course I was jumping for joy when I heard he had a new novel coming out. Having Keanu Reeves be the co-author was so random and unexpected that it just made me even more curious to see what the heck was going on with this one.
The book starts with a suicide bomber, someone who completely fails in his mission because the target survived. Quite a few other people died in the blast, the room where it happened is covered in wreckage and blood, and the target himself is now missing the lower half of his face and has a gigantic hole in his chest but he..didn’t…die. And he’s laughing, because being able to die is something he’s wanted to do for a good portion of eighty thousand years, and nothing ever works, and you have to laugh because really, what else is there to do? If death is what gives life meaning, what kind of meaning is there for someone who knows his life will never stop?
“I told you,” he had said. “I don’t want to die. What I want is mortality, and that’s not the same thing.”
It’s hard for me to figure out what elements of the book are Reeves and what are classic Meivielle, because a lot of this book is set in a grittier, more down-to-earth, mundane world than so many of Mieville’s other books. Our main character is Unute (also known as just “B”, the latest iteration of the star of Reeve’s comic-book “BRZRKR”), a world-weary wanderer from prehistoric times who’s signed on with a Black Ops group that can always find a use for an immortal soldier who’s spent thousands of years perfecting the art of killing and can go into a berserker rage that comes complete with blue lightning. In exchange for these services, the government agency over the group promises to use all their scientific resources to find a way for Unute to die. The chapters set in present day have a lot of what usually isn’t interesting about Black Ops work; the arguments about rank and security access, discussions about logistics, trying to figure out the duty of care needed for soldiers grieving comrades who have been killed (accidentally) by their own weapon, and bemused scientists who are trying to study a subject who is both scientifically impossible and also has a favorite type of chair and likes LP records.
At the same time this book is exactly as fantastical as Mieville’s other books, because the main character is over eighty thousand years old. His mindset is completely alien and also painfully human, he’s seen civilizations rise and fall and vanish from history, and he’s constantly having to gently remind people that they only think things like flying machines and scuba gear have been around for a couple of hundred years. He remembers everything he’s seen, the scientists have an endless amount of questions, and the authors drop in little tidbits of information that never get fully explained because the offhand remarks by Unute about something he’s never thought to bring up before (“The Draboon Imperium, The Calabash Queendom. The Commonwealth of the Palms. Atlantis and Mu and Hyperborea, sure.”) will give the scientists even more questions than they already had.
…and of course, though she doubted it, or thought she did, and wanted to, it being the nature of these insights that she could never find a scintilla of evidence, Diana could never be cast-iron certain that B wasn’t just fucking with them.
There are probably a million examples of the Immortal Wanderer in fiction, and I’m always fascinated by anything that explores what that might actually be like for someone who doesn’t die. Who can’t die, (at least not permanently, just long enough to regrow a new body.) What happens to relationships when the people you love pass away as easily as the ones you don’t? When you can join the resistance and realize thousands of years later that no one even remembers the race of people involved, much less what they were fighting about. Centuries of deliberately not caring about anything followed by a passionate love-affair because even not caring has to end eventually. Unute isn’t even concerned that the researchers are trying to figure out how to make more of him, or weaponize his very dangerous abilities even more than they already have, because he’s been through this so many times already. If they can’t figure out how to let him die then he’ll just be trying something else in whatever rises from the ruins in another thousand years.
Once you spent three lifetimes sitting without moving on a stone chair halfway up a mountain, to see what would happen. Nothing happened.
Chapters set in the present day alternate with stories from the past, many (but not all) narrated by someone who had the good luck to meet the mysterious stranger who didn’t age or die. Or maybe it’s the bad luck to meet him; it all depends on whether he’s currently trying out apathy, or compassion, or cruelty, or all of them together mixed with some debauchery that you can tell he’s already bored by. Some of these narrators curse the day they met him. Some are just sad and angry that he left. At least one summarizes their entire history with Unute with a haunting, beautifully wistful literary metaphor that took my breath away.
Speaking of literary, the authors do interesting things with language in this book. I was a little concerned when reading the first chapter because it was written in a clipped, clinical style that felt a little stilted. But then within that chapter the writing speeds up, pouring out information in a barrage of “and they saw,” and he aimed” “and he was sobbing”, building up to the moment everything goes boom.
The chapters told in the past are all a different narrative style, depending on whether the narrator is a dying doctor, a dying non-binary servant, or an Irish immigrant to Canada remembering being a child stowaway with the strangest protector you can imagine. Unute’s stories from the past change depending on whether he’s currently apathetic, despairing, or caught up in yet another quest to find his purpose, his origins, or someone who might possibly be like him. There’s one section that goes on for pages, one paragraph, one sentence, an entire lifetime of love and heartbreak told the way you’d talk about a game you played on your phone while putting off starting the laundry. And not too long after that there’s a section of short, clipped sentences, listing off all the horrible, horrible ways to die when you aren’t capable of dying, atrocity after atrocity, a lifetime – multiple lifetimes, decades or more – of torture in one long inescapable now.
Yes, there is a lot of violence in this book. The battle scenes are a symphony of violence, but that pales in comparison to what the main character goes through. Unute’s deaths are never permanent and he heals from everything, and oh do the authors love to explore what that looks like. Even giving a snack to a nearby buzzard is a gigantic “yiiiiikes” moment. Unute takes himself out on at least one occasion, and my notes for that is just the word “jezus” when I saw what determination is needed for that when one bullet isn’t enough.
A series of very strange occurrences in Unute’s Black Ops group, including someone not being dead and an immortal bipedal pig (you heard me) is the catalyst for everyone involved to speed up their exploration about what can be done with Unute’s powers, and who’s secretly working for someone else, and which of the many cults and religions and secret societies that have formed around him are trying to accomplish…something. And meanwhile Unute is trying to find out, not just the “how” of he came about, but most importantly the “why”. An accident? A tool? Maybe even an actual god, which is as good an explanation of anything scientists have been able to come up with. Since the beginning of Unute, people have decided that he’s a god of death, and Unute has started to realize how far these groups – filled with grieving people who are fed up to here with the entire concept of death – will go to find the opposite of him. Which, no spoilers, does actually happen. It’s just not the god you think it’s going to be.