“The Book of Elsewhere” is punctuated with dreamy, second-person interludes from B’s lonely eons upon the earth, as he observes the rise and fall of civilizations, technologies, species, religions, languages and ideologies. There’s an extended cameo from Sigmund Freud, who tries to treat the warrior’s incurable melancholy. B reflects on meeting Karl Marx (“always much funnier than most people make him out to be”) and the playwright Samuel Beckett, who, in the novel’s loopy alternate history, once cast B in his absurdist play “Krapp’s Last Tape.” There’s a central plot element that involves a magical, immortal deer-pig — specifically, a wild, tusked Indonesian pig called a babirusa — who has been hunting B for 78,000 years, and becomes both his nemesis and the closest thing he has to family.
The narrative is littered with arcane facts and references. Among the terms I had to Google: sastrugi (snow that’s been shaped into wavelike peaks by wind), smilodon (a fanged feline predator that lived in the Pleistocene epoch), Urschleim (a term coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel for a primordial slime from which all life emerged), khesheph (a kind of ancient near-Eastern magic) and glyptodon (a giant armadillo that went extinct around 12,000 years ago but, in B’s telling in “The Book of Elsewhere,” managed to survive in France until the 400s A.D.).
“There is play in this as well,” Miéville said. “It’s not all existentialism and Freud. It’s an opportunity to imagine glyptodons in early Burgundy.”
At the mention of glyptodons, Reeves rolled backward in delight, letting out a high-pitched “hee-hee” and flashing the rock n’ roll sign with both hands.
Reeves has other ideas for new works based on the character, including, possibly, an epic poem.
“Show business looks at it like, what else can we do, but I come at it from the artist’s side, like what else can we make,” Reeves said. “From the very beginning I was hoping that other creators and artists could play, as China said, with the toys.”
