Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

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"Zinzi December has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job - missing persons."

***

Who here remembers urban fantasy? Hands up.

No, no, no. Those of you waving your arms in the air at the thought of some forbidden affair between a tough female protagonist and a gentleman of the night, think again. Of late, there's been a largely regrettable insurgence of such fiction: a counter-culture of wish-fulfillment fiction bearing transparent elements of the fantastic and set against one urban environ or another has arisen - if only to be subsumed itself by the zeitgeist. Paranormal romance by any other name (the vast majority of which smells as sour as the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyer have taught us to expect) has thoroughly co-opted urban fantasy in recent years, and the genre, as is, bears only a trifling resemblance to the mature and sophisticated fiction it once espoused. In short, an overabundance of Twilight wannabes and screeds of sexy vampires have given urban fantasy a bad name. With Zoo City, South African author Lauren Beukes is taking it back.

Meet Zinzi December. Animalled after murdering her own brother, Zinzi serves out her penance in a district of Johannesburg where "Zoos" such as she and sometime-significant other Benoit can live in relative peace, zoned off as they are from the rest of the world. With a Sloth slung over her shoulder, an externalisation of her fratricidal guilt and a constant reminder of her crime, life isn't easy for Zinzi. Against her better judgment, she works as a 419 scam artist in order to repay the staggering debt she has accumulated thanks to a past-tense drug addiction, making ends meet in the erstwhile by "finding lost things" with the supernatural talent she acquired as a by-product of being animalled. Only ever things, though - never people. But Zinzi's fallen on hard times. When one of her clients ends up mercilessly slaughtered and an opportunity to pay off her crippling debt once and for all arises, she puts her principles to the side and sets about her unusual charge: the rooting out of a missing Afropop starlet.

You simply wouldn't credit that Zoo City is only Lauren Beukes' second novel. She doesn't put a foot wrong for the duration. With endless verve and a cynical wit, she carries off a concept so audacious as to beggar belief, an inspired riff on the daemons of His Dark Materials which has humanity reevaluating its roots in the aftermath of the Zoo Plague, or AAF (Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism). "It's a fragile state - the world as we know it," Beukes warns us. "All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin and a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they know goes right out of the window." Relevant and revelatory, the ghettoisation of the Zoos in the pockmarked and unrelentingly urban landscape of Johannesburg also recalls the quandary of the slumdog prawns of District 9, yet Beukes confers on the animalled of her novel a murky sense of depth Neill Bloemkamp could only imply.

The Zoos are tragic creatures, one and all; some hateful, others haunted - Zinzi most of all. A recovering journalist, as Beukes has it, and "master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam," Zinzi is an embittered anti-heroine living, as all Zoos do, in fear of the Undertow, an unknowable terror which suffuses the fringes of her existence. She has, of course, more immediate concerns, foremost amongst them the everyday dangers of life in a city bereft of (conventional) order. Singularly the most disturbing of all her encounters in Zoo City, short perhaps its truly gruesome dénouement, is with a gang of junkie tunnel rats who have stolen her phone. Zinzi has fallen so far, yet she still has her pride, and so she makes the mistake of confronting them. Realising her mistake, she runs; they tear through the sewers after her with a rusty, sharpened screwdriver and such unadulterated hate that we see it is the city, in as much as the Zoos, that she need fear.

Zinzi is not so easily dissuaded. She washes the stink of the sewer off her and immediately follows up on her next lead: could Songweza, the absent half of Afropop sensation iJusi, have taken up with a burly bouncer working the doors of Counter Revolutionary? Zinzi is a strong female protagonist in every sense; and she is strong in the face of violent crime, betrayal and a city that seems to want her dead - not just a bit downtrodden until she attracts the attention of a devilishly handsome werewolf, as in the mode of many so-called "urban fantasy" narratives. Her Sloth, meanwhile, is more than a glorified pet: it has its own personality, its own desires - often at odds with Zinzi's - and yet it is a part of her that she must come to terms with, however much she despises what Sloth recalls, for the Undertow comes for all those who are separated from their animal companions.

Zoo City is lean and mean urban fantasy in the best and most respectable sense of the thing. In Zinzi Beukes gives us a truly compelling character: strong, centered, flawed just so and brilliantly intertwined with her world. In the titular district of Johannesburg, the South African author offers up an environment so desperate and evocative it puts innumerable paint-by-numbers fantasylands to shame. Hard-bitten, deliciously vitriolic and utterly engaged, both with the city and what the city means to those who call it home - for want, one intimates, of anywhere else to - Zoo City is, in short, the best thing to happen to urban fantasy in years.

***

Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

September 2010, Angry Robot

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Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
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Recommended and Related Reading

How I Lost My Brandon Sanderson Virginity

Brandon Sanderson is a name that's been gaining traction in fantasy circles for years now, like a pebble let loose down a slope quilted in soft snow: the further he's travelled, the bigger he's gotten. Exponentially so. He's accumulated such staggering momentum going from Elantris in 2005 through to Warbreaker and the much ballyhooed-about Mistborn trilogy... and it wouldn't do to forget his contribution to the last movements of The Wheel of Time, would it? In terms of awareness - and no doubt sales - that latter alone has seen Sanderson accelerate from mach five to faster than light in such a short space of time that he has to be the envy of every gradually rising genre author on the face of the planet.

Now I tend to read all the big genre releases - just to keep up with the scene, such as it is. But... I really don't care for The Wheel of Time. I'm sorry, guys; nothing the late and oft-lamented Robert Jordan wrote in his lifetime spoke to me at all. And though I'm more interested in the series now that Sanderson has taken the reins than I ever have been before, I'm not one to jump into a multi-volume epic fantasy on book twelve, nor can I foresee an occasion when I have the time to catch up on the multitude of doorstoppers before it, so I passed on The Gathering Storm, as I'll skip Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. I mean no slight on either author in so doing, but The Wheel of Time just isn't for me.

Sanderson's original work, however, is another thing entirely, though I'll 'fess up here and now: despite owning a complete set of the beautifully rejacketed Mistborn trilogy, he's another of the long list of prolific fantasy authors I've somehow managed to miss. Courtesy of #bookfail, a new feature I'm working on for The Speculative Scotsman about the gaping holes in my own experience of genre fiction, you'll soon have the opportunity to learn which other speculative greats I am ignorant of. George R. R. Martin, anyone? Richard Morgan?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

Because over the weekend, I made a move towards remedying one such glaring oversight: with the generous excerpt of The Way of Kings posted on tor.com - the equivalent of 50 pages in length - I finally popped my Brandon Sanderson cherry. You'll know about this promotional blitz already, I'm sure. Aidan covered it on A Dribble of Ink; as did Patrick, Werthead and everyone's favourite albino carebear, along with near enough every other blogger. And don't think I wouldn't have too, had it not been for Mark Charan Newton week.

As is, I'm coming late to the party, but I'm coming armed to the teeth. See, I've actually read the excerpt - and this, I would add, isn't something I usually do. The sheer frustration of starting a story via such a thing and then having to wait months to read the rest of it usually wins out, in my case. But I'm told there's a galley of The Way of Kings winging its way to me as I write this, and so I thought, what the hell, and dug in.

And it's a curious thing, this excerpt. It's taken from the very beginning of the book - indeed, from the very beginning of a series that Sanderson has said could last for ten volumes - and it's a huge book at that, clocking in at just shy of 400,000 words. Suffice it say, then, that it's all about introductions. In the prelude to The Stormlight Archive, we meet Kalak, one of ten immortal men caught in a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction. In the aftermath of an horrendous battle with a thunderclast, an "enormous stone beast... with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulder," another of the immortals informs Kalak that they have decided to end the centuries-old Oathpact that binds them together. They go on their way, vowing not to seek one another out...

And from prelude to prologue, set 4500 years later. In To Kill, Sanderson introduces us to Szeth, a Truthless, which is to say an assassin, tasked by the Parshendi with the murder of Gavilar, the Alethi King. There's talk of stormlight, shardblades, magic, culture and uprising, and then there's a huge fight during which gravity takes a backseat.

In the three brief chapters which follow, three more narrators: Cenn, an anxious and inexperienced new recruit caught in a brutal border skirmish; Kaladin, Cenn's former commander, now a particularly dangerous slave with designs on his freedom; and Shallan, the last hope of a once-great family, who hopes to become the ward of a heretic Princess.

It's a lot to take in, all told, and without the context of what comes after, I fatigued a little each time Sanderson introduced a new perspective to the narrative. And yet each of the tale-tellers holds their own. Each serves to illuminate a different aspect of the world of The Stormlight Archive, and though, come to that, there's a fair amount of worldbuilding, Sanderson filters it well. Shallan's arrival in Kharbranth, after following in the wake of the Princess for six months, is as good a reason as any to show off the so-called City of Bells, just as Cenn's recruitment is an ideal means to introduce the reader to the wars which rage to this day.

And there's nary a lull in the action. From the prelude through to the first chapter, there's no short supply of fights and flights, adeptly told and brutal in their way without ever erring on the war-porn that's come to be so prevalent in modern fantasy - Sanderson even dispatches a major character in that time, though I won't say who. Kaladin and Shallan's chapters, meanwhile, are less literally action-packed, but even in these sequences there's movement, a sense of purposefulness that keep you interested. And hardly a page goes by without Sanderson introduction one fascinating new aspect of his world or another: from sprens, tiny creatures that are essentially externalisations of elements and emotions, as the daemons were to the soul in His Dark Materials, to marble-skinned parshmen and the aforementioned thunderclasts, the flora and fauna of The Stormlight Archive appear by all accounts rich, detailed, and moreover, intriguing.

The word on the street is that Tor will make more excerpts from The Way of Kings available as we close in on the release date in late August, and were it not for the ARC I have on the way - you do not need to tell me how lucky I am, incidentally - you could be sure I'd read them as and when they appear. This excerpt mightn't have been the best introduction to the work of Brandon Sanderson, what with all the (mostly necessary) scene-setting and the lack of any further context against which to measure the (somewhat overwhelming) cast of characters introduced herein, but I can say with certainly that I'm desperate to read more of The Way of Kings.

And isn't that exactly what excerpts such as this are supposed to achieve?