Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genre: Science Fiction
Originally published: 2010
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 256

French title: Zoo City
French Publisher: Eclipse
Publication date: 2011
Translated by: Laurent Philibert-Caillat

This read was for the 2012 Around the World in 12 Books Reading Challenge hosted by Shannon at Giraffe Days (January: South Africa)

Zinzi 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.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.

Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own.

As many will know, Zoo City is the 2011 winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and its film rights were optioned a few months ago, but South African Lauren Beukes's novel had been the center of attention long before that. So, Shannon's reading challenge was merely an excuse to get this title at the top of my reading pile... and the very attractive price of the ebook edition on the Angry Robot ebook store finished convincing me. While it took me a while to get into it, Zoo City lived up to its high expectations!

Zinzi December lives in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, in a world very similar to ours except for the magic and/or science. I've read elsewhere that the novel takes place in near future dystopian South Africa but since the novel takes place in 2010, I suppose parallel dystopian South Africa is more accurate. At any rate, the world changed with the appearance of an "Afghan warlord and a penguin" (as Zinzi puts it), marking the appearance of aposymbiotism. Individuals who have committed various levels of crimes and misdemeanors are faced with the appearance of an animal with whom they have a special psychic connection and from which they cannot be separated. Some will be reminded of Philip Pullman's dæmons in His Dark Materials, but I suppose familiars are fairly common in speculative fiction... don't get me wrong, nothing in Zoo City is "common" or rehash. With the animal comes the threat of the Undertow and also the manifestation of a unique talent.

Zinzi has Sloth and a talent for finding lost things.... and also another talent for getting herself into shitty situations but I guess there wouldn't be a story otherwise! Aposymbiotics or zoos as they are referred to, live on the outskirts of society. While their living conditions are not exactly ideal, zoos living in South Africa are not nearly as bad off as zoos in other less liberal countries where they are openly experimented on, mistreated, tortured and killed. Still, zoos are clearly perceived as stained and once an animal is at your side, there's no turning back or even simply going on living your normal life. Accommodation will become impossible to find in certain areas, not to mention jobs.

Zoo City is a dark thriller that depicts an urban South Africa where technology intersects with magic and culture. It's fascinating in the way it mixes science fictional elements with an urban fantasy setting: voodoo in slums, magic with a scientific explanation. One example would be the sangoma that Zinzi consults at some points in the novel. This practitioner of traditional African medicine has a D&G logo on his vest and a cell phone which in case your didn't know, really comes in handy when you need to get in touch with the other side:

"I didn't know the ancestors were SMSin now."
"No, he calls me. The spirits find it easier with technology. It's not so clogged as human minds [...] data is like water - the spirits can move through it. That's why you get a prickly feeling around cellphone towers."
"And here I thought it was the radiation."

While I've never been to South Africa, I have had the opportunity to travel to other African countries and while each was very different, one thing that struck me pretty much everywhere was this strange combination of tradition and modernity. For example, I often saw women dressed in traditional outfits, driving a scouter, a designer bag on their shoulder. Zoo City clearly illustrates these interesting multi-layered identities, these intersections between multiple cultures and it also throws in a nice bit of magic in the mix.

The existence of zoos, or rather the appearance of their mashavi (their animal) is what I found to be most fascinating. While scientists have tried to explain their origin and sudden appearance, while they have applied technical terms such as "aposymbiots", there is really no explanation for their existence. Is it a spreading virus? Has the phenomenon always existed but at a smaller scale? Is global communications responsible for its spread? Is the Undertow a black hole that swallows whole the zoos when it's their time? Or is it the hand of God that's come to punish sinners?

No real explanation is given although many interpretations, both scientific and religious, are put forth. One character ventures:

"Maybe that's all your talent is for, a distraction to keep you preoccupied until the blackness comes rushing in."

To be honest, Zinzi and the other zoos have other problems to deal with and are not too concerned with the origin of this mysterious condition. They are more concerned by its immediate consequences and how it affect every aspect of their lives, putting them in a precarious situation, regardless of their race, gender and social background. Zoo is a new class of its own.

I must admit that I first struggled with Zoo City's first person narration. Everything is so alien, you're not sure what you're stepping into. Lauren Beukes doesn't take her reader by the hand, she dumps you in Zoo City and leaves you to fend for yourself and piece together the background story. Like any new zoo, you'd better figure it out fast and by yourself in order to survive. While I'm always grateful for limited info dumps, this process can put off some readers. Should that be the case, do persevere because it's well worth it! There's a lot going on in those 256 pages, this is dense novel, nothing in there is superficial. 

Zinzi's character is not your coy heroine; she's guile, cynical and morally dubious at the best of times. But that only makes the novel's first person narration all the more witty and engaging (if you're a fan of dark humor which I am).

Context is provided by a series of interview transcripts, scientific reports and other supports that nicely complement Zinzi's story. All those elements add something raw, real and almost authentic to the novel. In a strange way, despite its parallel dystopian setting, Zoo City is very much anchored in the now. This is also helped by the bits of South African slang, the various references to contemporary musical artists and pop culture that are spread throughout the novel.This is somewhat unusual in scifi (less so in urban fantasy I suppose) which is either grounded in fandom with a lot of geeky allusions or projected so far in the future that it wouldn't make any sense to include references to pop culture.

When I started reading Zoo City, I wasn't really sure if it fully qualified for Shannon's challenge which mainly aimed at discovering or learning more about a country, its culture, history and geography. Zoo City taking place in a futuristic Johannesburg, I didn't really know how much I was going to learn about contemporary South Africa. However, Lauren Beukes's projection of Johannesburg, while subjective and somewhat pessimistic, tells a lot about the issues the country has faced in the past and is still currently facing. The lady is in her own words a "recovering journalist" and perhaps this is the reason why social awareness is such an integral part of her writing. I read in an interview that a lot of research was done on the actual inner city slum of Hillbrow, as well as interviews of immigrants, refugees and social outcasts, so I do believe that her descriptions of life in the slums fairly reflect reality.

Zoo City is not novel about the apartheid although racial issues do crop up here and there. While the treatment of zoos is clearly an allegory of xenophobia and zoos are stigmatized, forced to carry their guilt for all to see, the focus seems to be more on class than race. Like in current Western societies (post-racial societies as some call it but there's a whole other debate here, isn't there?), racism is not quite as open and transpires in more vicious ways in everyday life.

Interestingly enough, I'm currently reading the memoirs of a white Englishman who grew up in South Africa during the years of the apartheid. So this has turned out to be a very South African month for me (though I've dragged it well into February) and I'm approaching this in a somewhat backwards manner... from the future to the past and also from fiction to non-fiction. Still, while the novel's events are not in any way tied to the apartheid, the memoir is adding some nice insights into the country's history (and also making it painstakingly clear how little I actually know about the apartheid!).

Zoo City is an ambitious and audacious novel that lives up to all the buzz around it and that I would highly recommend.

One note on the covers, while my preference goes to the UK cover (black and white cover which I think is super cool), I'm quite happy that the US cover displays a character of color. I thought it worth noting after the last years' cover-fails.