It would be a vast understatement to say that this book was a surprise.
Not being familiar with the comics (so unfamiliar, in fact, that I didn’t even know they existed), the first impact with the main storyline was “ok, what the hell am I reading?”. But that disorientation faded fast, overrun by — to quote directly — “eggs and pigs and blood and frenzy and the loss of the self like the oceanic release of the mystic.” That sentence alone tells you what we’re dealing with: not myth retold, but myth metabolised, chewed up and run back through a body that can’t die and can’t forget.
What Reeves and Miéville do is take the trope of the immortal warrior — the berserker, if you will, the thing that’s haunted epic since Gilgamesh went looking for the plant that wouldn’t let Enkidu stay dead — and spin it into a wonderfully modern tale of the deathless, told from his own perspective. It would have been easy, even lazy, to make this another entry in the tired lineage of brooding immortals who’ve “seen it all” and speak in weary aphorisms. This isn’t that. B, the protagonist, isn’t tired in the way fiction usually means tired: he’s accumulated, layered, a geological formation of violence and grief rather than a single consciousness wearing centuries.
The structure is highly ambitious too: scraps of tales scattered through time interrupt and inform a primary storyline set in the present, and running underneath both is a second-person voice — insights, addresses, warnings — that I don’t think I’ve ever seen actually work before. The second person is usually a gimmick, a party trick that draws attention to itself and then has nowhere to go. Here, it does something powerful.
And the questions the book asks are the right ones, which is rarer than it should be in stories about people who can’t die: what would a deathless harbinger of death actually do in our own times, stripped of sword-and-sandal trappings and dropped into a world of surveillance, black-site interrogation, and cable news? What would cults around him look like? Not medieval reverence, but the very contemporary, very online kind of worship that curdles into extraction and control. And who would seek to fight him, and how do you even begin to threaten something that has already lost everything it could lose?
The reflections on life, death, grief, and time that emerge from all this are genuinely profound for a book that also contains this much viscera. And the whole tapestry is wonderfully non-Eurocentric — the berserker myth gets pulled out of its usual Norse cul-de-sac and set against a much wider, older set of traditions — and not even anthropocentric, for what matters: the book is as interested in what a body is, biologically, animally, as it is in what a spirit might be. B is as much meat and mycelium as he is myth. And the pig is none the less.
I’m stunned and in awe.
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