[Review] Zoo City by Lauren Beukes [Part 2]

Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genres: Urban Fantasy
Copy: 364
Publisher: Angry Robot Books, September 2010
Standalone/Series: Standalone
Copy: ARC from Angry Robot

Blurb:

Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things.

To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all: the truth.

Available from: Amazon - US - UK | B&N | BookDepository

Cover Comment: I don't particularly like the US cover. Sure the colors are great and the photo manipulation clever, but truth is that it doesn't do anything for me. It lacks the same WOW effect the UK cover has and that is that.

Review: In yesterday's review I briefly touched upon the plot of "Zoo City", since any coverage is spoiler-risky, and expanded on the world-building aspects of the book, Zinzi December as the driving force behind the novel and pacing. In this post I'll talk about Johannesburg as an active protagonist, the inclusion of animals as support cast, themes and bonus tidbits.

Urban Fantasy, as I understand it, is a genre, in which the city acquires an expanded role. From a setting the city becomes a protagonist, who influences the story. The series I have read in the genre use 'urban' as an indicator the story will take place in a modern setting. Beyond that the city remains a prop and nothing else. In "Zoo City" Johannesburg comes to life and shows its different faces such as Jozie and Joburg. It's a city of many names, of many moods, of many faces. Considering how "Zoo City" follows the noir tradition, it's important to establish how Johannesburg can be both generous and merciless:

The urban sprawl thins out as the road deteriorates; kitmodel cluster homes, malls and the fake Italian maestro-work that is the casino give way to B&Bs, stables, ironwork furniture factories and country restaurants. The hawkers selling giant plastic mallets and naïve Tanzanian banana-leaf paintings and the guys handing out flyers advertising new townhouse complexes get increasingly pushy as the spaces between traffic lights grow longer. A grizzled bush mechanic sits under a corrugated-iron leanto, rolling a cigarette and looking out for customers attracted by the badly hand-painted sign propped up outside advertising exhaust fittings.

At the same time, Johannesburg is Zoo City, home to the 'animalled'.

People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other’s bums. The smell of cooking – mostly food, but also meth – temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. The crack whores emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape, and catcall the commuters heading to the taxi rank on the street below.

While dangerous, it still offers protection:

On my way home, the dull crackle of automatic gunfire, like microwave popcorn, inspires me and a bunch of other sensible pedestrians to duck into the nearby Palisades shopping arcade for cover.

Another way "Zoo City" becomes alive is through the 'shavi'. I'm skeptical towards animal characters. It's easy for animals to become deux ex machina especially when they display outside the norm for their species behavior. A bird perched on the shoulder, faithful dog and highly amiable squirrel. Animals can fly, are faster than humans and smaller. Thus it's easy for them to save the human protagonists in the 'nick of time'. The 'shavi' are animals that grant their masters supernatural abilities and display their own distinct personalities.

Deus ex machina is written all over and yet you don't see animals saving humans in dumb or predictable ways. Animals have limitations and I think the reason Beukes gave Zinzi a sloth has more to do with sloths being passive and useless. It's why Zinzi's gift is also not of great use in combat. Zinzi has to rely on herself and not on something given to her. It's a similar situation with other characters and their 'shavi'. Beukes features a mongoose, a poodle, a handicap vulture, a scorpion, a bunny, a butterfly. Animals without fighting capabilities.

"Zoo City" isn't only a murder mystery, it's a book about Africa. You can sense that in the heavy use of African slang. On one hand, the slang creates authenticity and adds a pop to the story, separates it from the rest and gives "Zoo City" authenticity. Then again, I could barely grasp any of the African words, only what the contrast hinted. Thankfully, Beukes knew where to restrict herself so that the novel remains accessible to outsiders. Beukes discusses muti, the African traditional medicine as well as the ritualistic murders practice.

As a book about Africa, "Zoo City" handles themes typical for Africa. To me the social dynamics between the normals and the animalled recalls the apartheid system, which was the status quo until not that long ago. However, here the segregation is based not on race, but on whether the individual is an aposymbiot or not. The whole novel deals with Zoo City's forceful isolation from the rest of Johannesburg. There is obvious discrimination. Zoos are denied job positions, services and even entrance to certain establishments. It's as if there is a city within the city, which the majority pretends not to exist.

A truly spectacular novel.

Verdict: 'Zoo City' the novel for the adrenaline junkie. Gripping from page one, it rockets through a rollercoaster plot. Beukes never stops the action and delivers a page-turner seemingly without a fault. Substance, setting, characterization. It's all there. You can't go wrong with this one.

Reviews I've seen: [if there are reviews I have failed to mention link me up in the comments]

Speculative Book Review
Red Book Review
Kamvision
Dark Fiction Review

[Review] "Zoo City" by Lauren Beukes [Part 1]

Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genres: Urban Fantasy
Copy: 364
Publisher: Angry Robot Books, September 2010
Standalone/Series: Standalone
Copy: ARC from Angry Robot

Blurb:

Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things.

To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all: the truth.

Available from: Amazon - US - UK | B&N | BookDepository

Cover Comment: I'm having an illicit affair with Zoo City's UK cover. It's wild, it's more than dangerous. The cover represents the novel. It's black and white for the noir. The title is a collage of the city's landscape and the shavi of the characters. Very dynamic and alive considering how monochromatic the color scheme is.

Review: I can't start this review without nitpicking the worldbuilding, because it is the crux of the story. Without it, there would be no story. Beukes alters only one thing about reality, but it has a global effect. Every human to commit a grave sin becomes attached to animal and develops some sort of supernatural talent. As a result, the 'animalled' are regarded as sort of subhuman species, because their animals distinguish them as grave sinners, which have no place with the innocent and pure normal people. Notice my sarcasm, but I'll dig into the social dynamics in "Zoo City" later.

Most reviewers instantly go to Phillip Pullman, when discussing the concept of the 'shavi' [the animals]. It can't be helped since Beukes drops his name at some point. I don't think there are many touching points between the two worlds. For one, Pullman's daemons are the manifestation of a person's soul, the good and the bad. Beukes 'shavi' represent their master's sins and nothing else, a sort of divine Scarlet Letter that can't be hidden from the world and society.

Again, unlike Pullman, the 'shavi' grant their aposymbiots [another word for animalled] an ability [in Zinzi's case the ability to track lost items]. If these people are sinners, then who would empower them and why? Corrupted people abuse power as Beukes shows in her novel. Is it a divine balancing act? An attempt to diminish the sting of marked? Or is it a prompt to change through using this power for good? Perhaps it's all about survival.

There are no answers, but I also don't think readers need the answer. Rarely in life do we find anything explained to make sense to us. Why should we expect fiction to spoon feed us explanations.

What I do think deserved to be explained a lot earlier is the concept of the Undertow, a process of the utmost importance for all 'animalled'. The Undertow gets mentioned almost in the beginning of "Zoo City" and until page 181 I had to figure out what exactly it was. The following excerpt might spoil the fun for those, who have yet to read the novel, but the Undertow only adds to the mystery of this world:

Current scientific thought tends toward an understanding of the “Undertow” as a quantum manifestation of non-existence, a psychic equivalent of dark matter that indeed serves as a counterpoint to, and bedrock for, the principle of existence.

Zinzi December isn't one of the questioning types. The novel isn't focused on the world, but on survival. Now there Zinzi is proficient. She works with what she has and that's no smooth sailing when she has a Sloth attached to her back. In order to survive, she takes up small jobs finding lost items. She participates in 419 scams and her background isn't a pretty one too. Former druggie. Former journalist [never to have a decent reputation] and a current manipulator.

You get the picture. Zinzi isn't a wholesome person. Yet, I couldn't help but care for her or laugh with her, fear for her and applaud her for every new scheme she devised. Zinzi's the adhesive that holds all the elements together. Anything less of this character, stretched between her conscience and what she is willing to do for her survival, and "Zoo City" would have flopped.

Zinzi is the ultimate Bad Girl that is so Good, an archetype popularized in Urban Fantasy and turned into a cliche as soon as the genre boomed. Where other 'Bad Girls' fail with a wide assortment of weapons, martial arts skills and physical force, Zinzi succeed for she's a McGyver when it comes to manipulating others. Her strength comes from within, stems from her spirit's resilience, from her resistance to become her sins. At the same, Zinzi is as vulnerable as any human being living in these circumstances.

And this whole package is enhanced through Beukes' prose:

Yellow light slicing across my pillow like a knife would be the appropriate simile, but it feels more like a mole digging its way into my skull through my right eyeball. There is a boy in my bed, or at least I think it’s a boy. It’s hard to judge gender by the back of someone’s head. But I have my suspicions, based on the sandy curls and the snippetsof last night that my brain is starting to defrag.

Plot-wise, "Zoo City" is a merry-go-round, if merry-go-rounds had rocket engines strapped for maximum velocity that is. It blasts off as a simple task to find a missing ring, then gets upgraded to a missing person's case and at the last stretch involves a high body count. It's a very intricate whodunit noir with secretive clients, frame-ups and scandals ready to pop out in the open.

From this vague summary above, I take it you've figured out how fast-paced "Zoo City". Written in present tense and in first person point-of-view, the book can be described as extremely caffeinated. The present tense in general doesn't allow the narrator to skip any moment in the narrator, unlike the past tense. At the same time, Zinzi's exclusive first person account guarantee's an uncut director's version of what's happening. The combined effect is an adrenaline saturated story.

While Beukes knows what she's doing with the pacing and still delivers a multi-layered story, I'd say that at certain points I needed a break. A short pause to catch my breath. It never came. From one odd or dangerous situation Zinzi flies into another and I needed to sprint after her.

For some people this may not be an issue, but to me it felt unnatural. One scene that I thought was somehow completely without purpose [though I'm open to other opinions] was the sewer chase. I understand how it adds another aspect to Beukes' story in terms of setting, but it felt somehow random and disconnected from the general plot.

Next Part: Tomorrow I'll focus on Joburg and the 'shavi' as active characters, the themes and African culture [though the last in a very modest way].