Zoo City

Lauren Beukes
Angry Robot (angryrobotbooks.com)
978-0-85766-054-1

I misjudged Zoo City on first reading. It may have been my own high expectations, after the stripped-down clarity of Moxyland, Lauren Beukes’ debut novel. Or perhaps it was the glib ease with which Zoo City’s pop culture references flow off the page? It seemed to come a little too smoothly, a little too freely, as if hoping to dazzle you with a fast-paced plot and the trappings of urban grit; like a middle-class gangster wannabe flashing gang signs learned off TV.

But beneath the polished darkness of the novel’s surface, in the murky current of the undertow, there’s a depth which might catch you by surprise. It took me a second reading – maybe it’ll grab you first time. Watch your step.

The plot is a familiar one to anybody who’s ever read Chandler or seen Humphrey Bogart strut his stuff on the black and white. A private detective of sorts, Zinzi December, who specialises in finding lost things, takes what begins as a simple job but finds herself floundering rapidly out of her depth as the twists unfurl and the body count rises. It’s been done before, of course, but noir’s never about the story so much as the style. The plot need only get you from A to B as convolutedly as possible; along the way it serves as canvas for rich flourishes of setting and dialogue, and as a framework from which interesting characters can hang themselves.

The setting for Zoo City is an alt-Johannesburg which Beukes, a native, builds with all the power of the familiar and with lashings of style t’boot. It’s a city filled with dirt and life and culture of all kinds, of all levels, and the reader is quickly up to their eyeballs in Africana. The local slang seems to draw heavily on native languages, while much of the plot revolves around the South African music scene and provides a secondary bombardment of peculiar band names, technical jargon and industry cant. The richness of the language approaches Clockwork Orange levels at times, and while the inattentive reader might find such an assault of unfamiliar words somewhat off-putting, it’s an effective method of immersion in an alien culture.

And Zoo City’s Jo’burg is an alien culture, there can be no doubt about that. For a reader unfamiliar with South Africa, it always wears a cloak of menace; for a local, I can only imagine the combination of the familiar and the outright eerie makes for an uncanny, unsettling read. Because the novel isn’t just a hard-boiled noir – it’s an urban fantasy, albeit one far removed from the overtly fantastical end of the spectrum. Zoo City approaches its magic with a skeptic’s inherent distrust, exemplified in the director of a rehab clinic as she answers Zinzi’s questions about her methods:

  “I like good old-fashioned medicine. Methadone is a very good thing. Although a lot of medication is based on herbal remedies. And you shouldn’t discount the placebo effect.”
  “Magic?”
  “There haven’t been enough studies to ease my mind about the efficacy.”
(pp.177-8)

While Beukes’ magic is for the most part unobtrusive, its implications stretch into every corner of society. It’s always in the background, in casual asides and happenings which wrongfoot you, remind you this isn’t your world. Reinforcing this, Zoo City is littered with Watchmen-like supporting texts which provide intriguing snapshots of the world outside Johannesburg. Newspaper clippings, prisoner interviews, the abstract from a psychology paper and a movie summary from an imdb.com-esque website – including a handful of comments complete with all the off-topic rants and porn spamming you’d expect to find on the real thing – all add depth to the world Beukes is building here. These interludes allow the reader’s imagination to explore beyond the mean streets Zinzi December walks, and many of those texts pull double duty, laying out with exemplary lightness of touch the ways in which magic has changed the world.

The central conceit, that Zinzi and other criminals receive – from some dark and terrifying place – an animal companion akin to the daemons of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, is thoroughly explored in sociological terms. Nobody in the novel seems to dare speak the word ‘apartheid’, but the shadow of South Africa’s not-too-distant history hangs heavy over Zoo City. The animalled bear an indelible mark of pariah-hood which sees them reduced to second-class citizens – the buildings they live in are condemned and disintegrating, the neighbourhoods they inhabit are abandoned by the authorities, and persecution by mainstream ‘civilised’ society is widespread:

  “Where are you?”
  “Downstairs. Can I come up?”
  “No. Wait. I’ll come down. Meet me at Reputation. It’s the hotel bar across the road.”
  “I think they have a policy,” I say, leaving it hanging.
  “Oh. Oh right,” he says.
(p.127)

In the novel’s lighter moments Beukes has fun with the counter-culture implications of this prejudice, as teenage outcasts express their unthinking rebellion through reactionary solidarity with the animalled, while rappers desperate to appear ‘street’ pose with snarling beasts in their music videos. For the most part, though, Zoo City paints its animalled as a despised underclass struggling just to get from day to day. While apartheid is the obvious parallel given the setting, Johannesburg’s zoo-infested neighbourhoods – all but unpoliced and abandoned by society – bear striking similarities with the drug-ravaged inner-city ghettoes of The Wire. This is a culture which has written an entire swath of its population off as a bad job.

Just as the National Party didn’t exactly have a worldwide monopoly on institutionalised racism, however, Beukes’ South Africa is hardly alone in mistreating its zoos. One of the more chilling inserted texts includes an interview with a fourteen-year-old in a Pakistani prison, where the animals are bundled together to fight and die, drawing down the rolling shadows of ‘the Undertow‘ to claim their partnered humans. The animalled live with that shadow hanging over their existence like the Sword of Daedelus, and it drains their existence of hope:

  “A good cop doesn’t need to shoot to kill.”
  “Is that what you are? A good cop?”
She spread her hands. “You see a furry companion at my side?”
  “Maybe your conscience is on the fritz. There have been studies: sociopaths, psychopaths-“
  “The difference between you and me?” she interrupts… “The Undertow isn’t coming for me.”
(p.33)

The treatment of the animalled is one of the more fascinating aspects of Zoo City, and provides the driving force for much of its action. You could argue that society’s response to the zoos isn’t a baseless prejudice; having an animal isn’t a neutral quality like the colour of your skin, after all, but a permanent, inescapable mark of guilt. Yet the way the animalled are ostracised rejects any notion of rehabilitation or redemption, of second chances. Zinzi refers to her pre-sloth existence as ‘FL’ – Former Life – and when she toys with the idea of returning to journalism, it is with the daydream optimism of a child announcing their attention to become an astronaut.

Zoo City isn’t perfect; it’s a little too fond of the pop culture reference, and though the style of the writing is a suitable blend of wit and grit its relentless hipness begins to grate after a while. The twisty plot is for the most part solid, but there’s a little flab around the middle which could have benefited from a firmer editorial hand. Zinzi seems to lose her way, running out of threads to follow and leading the reader aimlessly around the neighbourhoods and nightspots like some kind of seedy tourist guide, while the novel’s pace flags accordingly.

It’s not long, though, before Zinzi remembers she’s a noir protagonist and develops an almost supernatural intuition, linking A to B on the most tenuous of connections – as if she’d managed to sneak a look at the author’s notes. In fact it’s Beukes’ deft foreshadowing which leads her protagonist on; hindsight reveals just how many pieces of the puzzle are subtly buried in the stream of narrative, and there’s no doubt it’s cleverly done. But it’s a technique which punishes any lapse of attention in the reader, and could leave them floundering in the story’s wake as it accelerates into the climax as if making up for its earlier lapse.

While it has its flaws, Zoo City is a stylishly told noir in a bleak, intriguing universe which casts a dark reflection of our own. At its best moments it leaves you unsure whether that darkness is a property of the mirror itself, or of the subject standing before it.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com. It was also written before Zoo City won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award.

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes
Angry Robot Books
978-0-00732-389-0


2018, in some unnamed South African city. Not that you’d know it was South Africa; apart from the occasional African flavour to the name of a character or location, everything in 'Moxyland' is so homogenised that this could be London, or Singapore, or Chicago. Everyone speaks the same, too – blending casual technobabble with casual profanity and teenage skaz, as they talk their way around the bleeding edge of popular culture and anti-establishment politics in a city where the former is trying too hard to shock and the latter is dangerous indeed. This is what the world looks like, once the internet has smeared any kind of cultural identity across all corners of the world and technology has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that to separate oneself from it is to separate oneself from society. Advertising is omnipresent, and intrusive on a level far beyond the webpage pop-ups and data-mined Facebook ads which niggle us today. Giant corporations exist on a separate plane from ’civilians’, their employees treated as a cut above the masses, while corporate executives hold complete control over every aspect of their workers’ lives – the feudal lords of a new world.

The most unsettling thing about 'Moxyland' is that this is a world clearly recognisable as a descendant of our own, the near-future setting making every erosion of civil liberties or cultural landslide all the more shocking for their proximity to events we read about in the news. This is a novel of horror and social realism as much as science fiction, taking the familiar and showing how easily it could turn on us. Our modern world is one in a state of tremendous flux, as the exponential curve of technological development clashes again and again with a social system no longer able to cope with it and too slow to adapt. 'Moxyland' is one way the world could develop, one frightening in its imminent possibility. Technology is integral here – your phone is housekey, communicator and bank card all rolled into one, and disconnection is a penalty more crippling than any physical punishment or prison sentence. The more centralised and automated the systems which govern your day to day life, the easier it is to control; 'Moxyland' is an examination of what happens when society forges its own chains, examining the balance between the technology of convenience and the surrender of freedom.

It’s also a chilling, effectively written novel. Its protagonists are an unlikeable group, for the most part: a self-centred celebrity wannabe, a short-tempered anarchist, a naïve artist who’s sold out, and a ruthless security programmer on the corporate fast track. They might not generate much early sympathy with the reader, and the slow burn of plot development can make the novel difficult to get into. The depth and pace of the society Lauren Beukes’ characters inhabit, however, and the sheer intricacy of the world she has built, are enough to pull you in. This is a place where corporate advertising departments put their brand – quite literally – on up-and-coming athletes, musicians and artists; where the fluffy, cartoon aesthetics of online gaming for the pre-teens does nothing to disguise the violence of the behaviour they propagate; where advertising hoardings squat unassailable in a sea of viciously intelligent barbed-wire; and the publicity-starved broadcast every moment of their lives on the internet in a hope of getting that one big break. In this teeming, dynamic city - so like the world we know, but yet so alien – subtle, back-seat character building lets those characters slide quietly under your skin. You might not like them, but by the time the novel builds to its climax you’ll certainly care what happens to them.

And 'Moxyland' isn’t a novel which lets its characters off light. Actions have repercussions, good guys don’t always win, and there are no easy answers. This uncertainty builds real tension as the novel progresses towards its climax, as the various strands of reality weave around each other and the relentless minimalism of Beukes’ style evokes an oppressive atmosphere to match that hanging over the city – a tension leading to an utterly terrifying scene in which the police deploy biological weapons as a crowd-control measure.

Worse than the moment when electric-shock devices built into the protesters’ phones are activated, worse than seeing the faceless riot police turn as one and march away, is the sugar-sweet recorded announcement as bio-agents fill the air, listing the progression of symptoms with merciless compassion and ending with the following:
‘South African Police Services strongly advises citizens exposed to the M7N1 Marburg variation for their protection to report to an immunity centre immediately. Should you be too weak to report to an immunity centre, please call the South African Police Services and we will dispatch a mobile service to collect you. Again, this service is free, provided in the interests of public health and safety. The South African Police Services are dedicated to serve. How can we help you?’ (p.219)
The disbelief of the protesters – and those simply caught in the wrong place and time – is something shared by the reader. Surely no government, no matter how divorced from its citizens, could travel so far down that path? But humanity has willingly placed the tools of fascism in the hands of those with the motive and the will to use them, men and women who care only for power - as one says, ‘any action is justified in a state under terrorist threat.’ (p.293). It doesn’t take much effort to recognise the parallels with recent history, or even with current affairs – the uncomfortable question Moxyland raises is whether it’s truly terrorist to oppose a system which no longer recognises the rights of its individual citizens. There is a line between terrorist and freedom fighter, that much is clear – but when does it get drawn, and who gets to do the drawing?



This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com