Zoo City, the new book from SA author and journalist Lauren Beukes, synthesises a mix of volatile ingredients into an explosive concoction. Like her previous book, Moxyland, Zoo City is beguiling mash-up of different genres and fractured pop culture references.
The novel is a bleak urban fantasy, soaked in muti, and shot through with moments of gritty social realism. It’s also a hardboiled detective novel that channels Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as a satire about life in contemporary SA.
More than any of these things, it’s a travelogue that maps out the darkest corners and deepest waters of an alternate reality Johannesburg, and its pristine gated communities and decaying inner city. Zinzi December, the narrator of Zoo City, is the cynical and sardonic tour guide to Beukes’s parallel world Joburg.
It’s a world where those who have committed bad deeds are haunted by mashavi — animals that bond with them until their dying days and give them supernatural powers.
Zinzi is one of the “animalled”. She’s a murderer and former journalist, living in the tenements of Zoo City alongside others that share her curse. Her mashavi is a sloth that gives her the ability to find lost objects; she also has a more down to earth talent for pulling off 419 scams.
Zinzi finds herself accused of the murder of an old lady she was helping to recover a lost ring. Broke and friendless, she is commissioned to help a reclusive record producer, Odi Huron, find a missing teenage pop star.
To say more would be to spoil a twisty story that snakes from grimy slums where the poor, the criminal and the desperate live on the fringes of society to the “rotten heart of leafy suburbia” where the “grassy verges are more manicured than a porn star’s topiary”.
Zinzi’s narration is as brisk, blunt and begrimed as Joburg itself. She is an African take on the grubby, down-at-heel private eye of film noirs and dime store detective novels. Though she is deeply troubled, and harbours a guilty past, she’s also a plucky and engaging character who quickly wins the reader’s sympathy.
Zoo City is populated by a memorable gallery of characters and a grotesque menagerie of animal familiars. Snotty waiters, media poseurs, sleazy music producers, blue-rinse grannies and pop starlets rub shoulders with refugees from the war-torn Congo, scamsters and petty hoodlums.
Many of them will live on with you long after you reach the end of the book — especially the Maltese and Marabou, the sinister pair that initially commission Zinzi to find the pop singer.
They’re a grotesquely funny pairing of a debonair, wisecracking gent with his ridiculous Maltese mashavi and his companion, an androgynous “gangly angel” with a crippled Marabou stork strapped to her back. Perhaps the most sympathetically drawn character is Benoît, Zinzi’s lover and a Congolese refugee with dark secrets of his own.
Zoo City trailer (YouTube):
Zoo City isn’t just a novel — it’s a fictional universe with a complex and detailed back story that spills over its pages. There’s even an official soundtrack available for the book, made up of contemporary, urban songs that Beukes and HoneyB handpicked to capture the gritty mood of Zoo City.
The richness of the Zoo City universe is hinted at through the pop culture and media snippets scattered throughout the novel — a music magazine profile with Odi Huron, a faux movie database entry, media interviews with animalled prisoners, even a snippet from an academic text about the “aposymbiot” phenomenon.
Many of these items were crafted by other writers who took up Beukes’s ideas and ran with them at her urging. The book is refreshingly free of detailed exposition – it offers some theories and hints about the mashavi phenomenon, but lets you make your own mind up about what it all means. — Lance Harris, TechCentral
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