Animal Planet

Angry Robot

Pages: 384

7.99 pounds

Lauren Beukes is a South African journalist and writer. Her first book,2008’s dystopia Moxyland,was well-received. Zoo City,her second novel,is a fantasy crime thriller set in the city of Johannesburg.

Zinzi December is a former journalist. After the death of her brother (for which she is in some way responsible) and a spell in prison,she moves into Zoo City,a ghetto in Johannesburg inhabited by former criminals. Here she begins a new life and ekes out a living writing email for internet scams and helping people find missing objects,which are all too frequently in the city’s sewers. The one thing she refuses to do? Find missing persons. Then a client dies and Zinzi is unfortunately on the spot. She’s persuaded by a pair of thoroughly unpleasant characters to take on the case of a missing teenage popstar — and from there on it all goes to hell. Thus far,we have a reasonably typical (and rather good) noir crime novel.

Except that Zinzi carries a sloth with her everywhere she goes; her lover has a mongoose and her new employers are accompanied by a poodle and a bird of prey. In this universe,somewhere around the mid-1990s,certain people began to be accompanied everywhere by animal familiars. This “Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” or “animalling” seems to happen to individuals who have killed someone,and though many theories are discussed in the book,no one seems to know why it happens. The animalled are ostracised from their society and targeted by the police; the very presence of the animals confirming that they are guilty of something. Nor can you get rid of your animal by killing it — those whose animals die become victims of something called the Undertow (left undefined and all the scarier for it).

So there are elements of urban fantasy. And possibly science fiction as well: though very little is known about aposymbiotic familiarism,it is generally discussed with the assumption that there is a rational,scientific explanation for it. Beukes herself has suggested “muti noir” as an appropriate genre name for her books,but then that might just relegate it to one genre,which it certainly is not.

Whatever it is,Zoo City is impressive. The text is interspersed with different sorts of writing — excerpts from music magazines,medical journals,gossip blogs,internet spam and even something that looks like an imdb page. Zinzi,with her tragic past,her (frequently amoral) survival instinct and a job that skirts close to “detective”,is the ideal noir protagonist.

For outsiders,it is tempting to read almost everything that comes out of South Africa as being in some way about apartheid. In the case of Neill Blomkamp’s 2008 film District 9,this was certainly justified,though it did somewhat draw attention away from its science-fictional aspects. In Zoo City the parallels are less obvious,but they are very present. A number of places in the city have a “policy” against allowing the animalled in. Zinzi and those like her are subject to greater scrutiny by the law and are restricted to living in the only area in the city that will have them.

Wider African politics is also woven into the plot,particularly in the form of Benoît,Zinzi’s lover and a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Zinzi herself impersonates an impoverished girl from the DRC (much to Benoît’s disgust) in the service of one of her 419 scams.

Then there are the animals. Fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series will be familiar with the idea of “daemons”,animals that exist as a sort of external manifestation of the human soul. Beukes references Pullman within the text with a webpage that refers to “Steering by the Golden Compass: Pullman’s fantasy in the context of the ontological shift (2005)”. Beukes’ familiars are different from Pullman’s daemons because they exist only for a marginalised few. But this makes the relationship between human and animal far more interesting — simultaneously resentful and (reluctantly) affectionate.

If Zoo City has a major flaw,it is that its characters are not particularly likeable. Perhaps this is for the best,considering the number of awful things that seem to happen to them. Despite this,Beukes’ book is intelligent,gripping and relentless,and I look forward to seeing what she does next.