pc28����

So, about Berzerker: the character is half-man, half-god, and is cursed to a life of extreme violence. He’s wandered the world for 80,000 years, until he finally begins working for the US government to fight dangerous battles no one else will. His payback? Learning the truth about his endless existence, and how to end it.

It’s been a success by any stretch of the imagination — and Reeves even received the Inkpot Award at the recent San Diego Comic-Con for his contributions to art and pop culture.

Now, he’s adding a debut novel to his repertoire. “The Book of Elsewhere,” co-written with China Miéville, explores death and mortality.

Even Reeves, a beloved Hollywood star, geeks out like a fanboy. He was excited about the idea of doing a novel connected to the comic book, something he had been talking about with Boom! Studios, its publisher. When asked who he wanted to write it, his answer was instant: China Miéville.

“They said, ‘We’ll never get him.’ And I said, ‘Well, why don’t we just send them the comics and beg?’” Reeves says in a Zoom interview with the Star.

“Did he have to beg?” I ask Miéville, who was also on the call.

“You skipped a stage,” he tells Reeves, “which is me waking up one day to an email from my agent saying, ‘Keanu Reeves has a project he’d like to discuss with you.’” Miéville thought it was a prank — “because it was so ridiculous” — but was instantly intrigued. He read the comics, thought they were “great,” and the collaboration began.

Reeves sent Miéville drafts and images of “BRZRKR” stories that hadn’t even come out yet, so he could get up to speed. Meantime, he’d read much of Miéville’s work and thought it was “amazing.” Miéville, of course, is the English writer and critic whose novels include “King Rat” and the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning “Perdido Street Station.” His work has drawn comparisons to that of Kafka, Orwell and Philip K. Dick.

“I was really struck by a collection of his short stories,” Reeves says. “And in those works he was so adept at writing real-life and fantastical elements and circumstances. And I felt to have that high a level of a storyteller turn their gaze to ‘BRZRKR’ was a wonderful opportunity to bring it to life.” Miéville, he points out, created worlds in the voicing of characters that were powerful and emotional.

“I found that very moving,” Miéville tells Reeves. “Obviously, it’s very moving if someone likes your work, but short stories don’t get nearly as much love as novels ... I love short stories as a reader and I love writing them, although I write very few because I find them very difficult, in a good way. And so I was really delighted and taken aback.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, their mutual admiration, they took their time before actually committing to each other. They wanted to make sure they could work well together, that they had ideas that coalesced. They wanted to meet in person and, through some stroke of serendipity, they both found themselves in Berlin at the same time.

Miéville was further intrigued, and so started digging into the comics more, reading them carefully, making sure he liked them. If he hadn’t “it would have been dishonorable” to take on the project, he says. And then, he began picking up certain background details in the comic he thought he could do something with. “There’s a brief passage with Freud in the background, and I thought, OK, I want to focus on this.” Neither wanted it to be — nor could it be — simply a novelization of the comic.

“You can do different things with the novel,” Miéville says. “You can play with voice, you can play with pacing, that kind of thing. So it was a question of, how do we honour the source material, but also do something very, very different that works both for people who love the source material but also people who don’t know it at all?” 

For the last two or three years, the pair have been working on this sci-fi-cum-speculative-fiction novel. Defining it isn’t straightforward, nor should it be. Clearly, each had different skills to bring to the project — and Reeves, more or less, left the writing to Miéville, saying he didn’t want to get in his way, or indulge in a process where one of them wrote one chapter and another wrote the next. “That’s not what I was interested in,” Reeves says.

Still, Miéville adds, there were several places or voices that Reeves didn’t feel were fully developed, where he “wanted a sense of almost a kind of melancholy yearning.” Talking it through helped — “the process of hearing Keanu talk about it and the way he was trying to express something that’s very difficult to express” — and Mieville learned how to hear it and relate to it. All to say, the process was neither systematic nor linear.

The main characters, B and Diana, exhibit a depth of characterization that isn’t always evident in sci-fi, fantasy or speculative fiction — as those books often become more about the world itself.

Mieville quickly defends the genres — “I’ve grown up loving science fiction and fantasy” — while pointing out that he and Reeves wanted to surprise people with the novel. The book nods to a variety of genres, including thriller, historical fiction, sci-fi, fantasy and romance. 

“I think the architecture of the novel that you introduced — jumping into other characters’ points of view from the past, recent past, long ago, creating different worlds, but also these characters and voices which are so rich, but also very different,” Reeves tells Miéville. “There’s so much about life and death and the forces that act upon us.”

Other elements of surprise they wanted to introduce included both the profound and the thrilling. A helicopter chase honours the comic, which is “a kind of fantastic military thriller,” Miéville says. “It would be a cheap trick to be completely different and not obey those rules.”

But they also wanted to look at bigger, more existential questions. “The wager, of course, is that you can do both,” Miéville says, “and hopefully (have) some pleasantly surprised readers.”

And a pleasantly surprised co-author.

“One of the main characters is a deer pig (an immortal deer pig, in fact). I didn’t see that one coming,” Reeves deadpans. “There’s so many different characters, and how he dealt with death and life in an anthropomorphizing (way) was very surprising.”

“Dude. Spoilers!” warns Miéville.