Zoo City MP3 CD – Unabridged, April 29, 2014

A psychically-gifted young woman with a tainted past must rescue herself from her unsavoury present while solving a missing-person case and overcoming the forces of evil. The Zoo connection is her Bunyan-like burden-cum-familiar, a sloth.Animals are the Mark of Cain of Lauren Beukes's fantasy world. Some sort of supernatural retribution called the Undertow punishes killers by imposing an animal familiar on them, like the Burdens of The Pilgrim's Progress. Obviously the Undertow cares not a fig for PETA and animal rights, because the animals have no choice whether or not they'd like to be tied to a scumbag oxygen thief for the rest of their lives. The killer however does have a Hobson's Choice. You can reject your familiar, but then the mysterious shadows will fall around you and you will be swept away by the Undertow. Also, if your familiar dies then the Undertow will come and suck you off this planet. Exactly how it works if your familiar has a short life expectancy, like a sparrow for instance, and dies from natural causes after only a couple of years or a couple of weeks, the author doesn't say. It's a flimsy premise and you'll just have to do your duty as an educated reader with some serious suspension of disbelief.I must add that Animals with a capital A, or specifically animals that are the familiars of killers, are non-essential to the story. They interact with the human characters in no significant way and are there merely to qualify the book as fantasy rather than a trashy pulp-fiction detective story.Just so you know, I'm not into the fantasy genre. Already when I was six or seven I'd stopped believing in Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny never gained any traction with me. Harry Potter is not at all my style--although inconsistently, I'm a fan of The Wizard of Oz. Be warned that Zoo City is not going to get a very fair review from me. Honesty is all I can promise.In this book, Johannesburg's former high-rise glamour suburb Hillbrow has become a ghetto for animalled people, who are known to the rest of the human race as Zoos, and thus the name Zoo City.Zinzi December, a late-20's woman, has been animalled for causing the death of her brother. I'm uncertain about her degree of guilt and involvement in the killing. Perhaps it's spelt out in the text and I missed it from skimming over large tracts of the more tedious bits. Beukes hints that it was all an accident and not really Zinzi's fault, making her a victim of injustice and thus worthy of our sympathy, although if that's the case then why was she animalled?Zinzi's psychic speciality or mashavi is finding lost things. The story opens with her engaging to find a lost ring for a Mrs. Liditsky. While Zinzi is out ring-finding, through a plot logic that utterly beggars belief the Bad Guys kill Mrs. Liditsky to set Zinzi up--and what did they imagine they could possibly gain thereby?Zinzi's business ad in the personals clearly states that she doesn't do missing persons, but when Mark and Amira, aka Maltese and Maribou (their Animals) take her to meet music mogul Odi Huron, she readily agrees to find vanished songster Songweze, the female half of teenage twins music act iJusi.The assignment takes her into a couple of stressful and life-threatening situations even before the grand showdown. Most of the action takes place in Zinzi's comfort zone, scumbag oxygen thief addicts like herself.As a side-plot, in Zinzi's Former Life before she became a Zoo (euphemism for murderer), she had a successful career in journalism. She now uses this skill to write the scripts for 419 scams and assists a guy named Vuyo to defraud pensioners of their entire savings. Beukes writes about this as if it were a clever, exciting thing to do. Some serious prefrontal cortex development needed there.Zinzi has a lover, Benoit, a Congolese war refugee who has just discovered his wife and family are still alive in a refugee camp in DRC. Benoit, together with Zinzi's Sloth and Songweza's aunt Prim Luthuli, are the only three sympathetic characters in the whole book. The rest are all scumbag oxygen thieves.In very much the style of a Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler, Beukes writes a racy, pacy, street-wise criminal underground argot. Zinzi she portrays as the stereotype pulp detective, hard-boiled and cynical, a perpetual ugly sneer on her lip, with nary a good word to say for anyone. I kept waiting and hoping for something bad to happen to her but unfortunately (spoiler) she survives the climax, is converted in a manner of speaking to jesus, finds redemption, and we get a kind of Hollywood Hairball Happy Ending.The writing is slick in that it displays an easy skill at working with words and getting into a voice. It abounds in witty aphorisms and bons mots. Challengingly, Beukes chose as her point of view protagonist Zinzi December, a young woman of an unspecified racial group who seems to consider herself largely black, but also considers that this doesn't matter at all. This is pretty gutsy for a writer who comes from a privileged white background and I think that Beukes got away with it quite convincingly, though I'd like to hear what South African black readers have to say.There's only one brief section, around the Dumisani episode, where Beukes lapses into purple prose. The rest of her writing is efficient and economical.Now for the plot. It's a complete screw-up, lacking all logic, and the last twenty pages of the book are so excruciatingly bad that not even the Green Lantern could possibly rescue them. Beukes claims that several friends gave the book a highly critical read, but perhaps they were scared of hurting her feelings and telling her that the story made no sense at all. The typical colander is less porous.Beukes also got some other friends to write factional interstices, supposedly to improve credibility, but after encountering the second or third you will learn to skip right past them because not only are they boring, they add nothing to the story or texture.So where does this leave us? It took me two years and three tries to finish the book, because of the sick feeling in the stomach I got from reading about scumbag oxygen thief addicts. As a trashy pulp-fiction detective story it gets some extra points for the novelty of the South African setting. The raw quality of the writing deserves very high marks indeed. Zinzi's character I found imperfectly credible; if she thought the rest of the cast were a bunch of sad losers then who am I to disagree? Plot, as I said, so bad it's not even unintentionally funny. Bonus points for the Zoo concept, even if it wasn't terribly well executed: all fur and feathers and very little meat. Overall, the Jozi milieu feels authentic and I should know because that's where I've lived most of my life. I'm going to give this book three stars. To say that it's a standout landmark by South African standards is very sad commentary on our local writers.

Lauren Beukes is the Queen of Metaphors. I capitalized and underlined it so it must be true. I'll go into why this is an awesome novel in a second, but first let me treat everyone to one of Beukes' metaphors:"I haven't drive in three years and the car handles like a shopping trolley on Rohypnol."I don't highlight much when I read, if at all, but I found myself marking sentence after sentence reading Zoo City. Beukes writes with a rare vividness that would keep me reading regardless of what the hell she's writing about. As it turns out, what she's writing about has the same zest and magnetism as how she's writing it.Zinzi December is a Zoo. Having committed an unforgivable act she has become animalled, cursed (blessed?) with a Sloth that's an extension of herself. Unfortunately, to everyone who looks at her, Sloth is a scarlet letter marking her a criminal. She exists on the fringes of Johannesburg in the slum known as Zoo City where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in fear of being separated. A recovering drug addict, she owes money to some bad people. She writes 419 scam e-mails to keep the mob off her back and in her spare time she finds lost items for cash. When a client turns up dead before paying, Zinzi is forced to take on a missing person's case. She's hired by the private and wholly odd-ball music producer Odi Huron to find a teenage pop star. The case is her ticket out of life in the slums, but it might cost her the last shred of human dignity she has left.Joining a masterful group of first person SFF novels written over the past few years (developing trend?), Zoo City is told entirely within Zinzi's head. To some degree, Beukes' novel is a pastiche. Scenes and plot devices referencing The Golden Compass and the film District 9 are obviously prevalent. There are elements of noir, urban fantasy, psychological thriller, not to mention a bit of not-so-thinly veiled social commentary. Somehow Beukes manages to pull all this together and instead of coming off as imitation of these various styles she instead finds something all her own. Let's call it urban noir magical realism (that's gold baby, copyrighted!).In telling the story, Beukes takes her readers on a ride through Johannesburg. When I read Dervish House earlier this year I mentioned Istanbul as one of Ian McDonald's characters. I think the same holds true in Zoo City. Johannesburg, its music scene, and its abject class warfare, occupy significant space in the novel. Beukes' flawed protagonist is in many ways reflected in this space - corruptible, decayed, and hopeless. But she is also trying to be something else. In many ways the city acts as her foil - its static nature contrasting Zinzi's desire to be better despite her frequent failures.The most impressive accomplishment in Zoo City is it managed to make me forget I was reading a novel of speculative fiction. Basing the story in an realistic urban environment certainly aided Beukes' cause, but the depth and rawness of her prose grabbed me with its conviction. The city's music scene in particular was given so much dimension that Angry Robot and South African production house African Dope. released a Zoo City Soundtrack to compliment the novel. It's clear that Beukes' world isn't just an author's passing fancy. Zoo City is the representation of a fully realized vision of what Johanassburg would be if our conscience had four legs and fur.Sadly no novel is perfect, and there a few hiccups here and there. Things get a little occult toward the end, more so than the early parts of the novel might suggest, and the villain's motivation is a tad esoteric. There are also moments when the pace slows down usually as a result of not always brief asides. It's easy to breeze through these moments to get back to the compelling story. I strongly suggest reading them closely, not only for the key world building information provided, but for the fairly hilarious inter-textual Easter eggs scattered throughout.Nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for the best new writer in Science Fiction and Fantasy for her work in Zoo City, Lauren Beukes has established herself as someone to watch in the coming years. Regardless of the outcome of the vote, Zoo City is a novel that will stand up today, tomorrow, and for decades to come. I'm going to be in San Francisco next weekend and I'm hoping to take a daytrip to Reno and WorldCon. If I do, I fully plan to find my favorite South African writer and give her a big high five.

I cannot decide if this book is excellent or not. I started with high hopes but rapidly found I was getting bogged down in make-believe pop music trivia. I dislike this type of music and know very little about it (my failure). Having waded to pages of this I was increasingly dispirited by the grotty life that the heroine lived. I never felt any sort of link with her nor did I get a real feel for the life she lived. Several times I gave up altogether but, having paid good money for the book, i read on a bit. Sadly, although there was a bit of a cliffhanger ending I never really felt good from the task of attempting some sort of understanding what was goin og

I really felt in two minds about this book. In direct contrast to another reviewer, I very much liked the early stages. I loved the language, the energetic, richly metaphorical, invented slang that you don't yet understand but which conjures up the smell of another place, its noise and dirty streets. I was a bit mystified by the central trope (people who have sinned in this world, committed a crime, mysteriously get an animal that they must look after for ever more, a kind of literal monkey-on-your-back) but assumed I was meant to be: I nevertheless found it intriguing and looked forward to it being revealed and developed. But it never is developed, and nor is the story. The heroine essentially functions like a private detective, brought in to find a missing pop star kid: cue lots of interesting possibilities for playing with the blend of genres. But she never finds anything, or does anything much, except get into spots that others must get her out of. And then the end happens and its over. There is nothing to carry the whole weight of the book except the trope of the sin-bearing animals, and that isn't interesting or evocative enough to do it: in fact, it isn't developed beyond a vague idea, maybe, of bearing responsibility. Finally, I was left uncertain what I was to take from the book, what the author thought I would enjoy about it.

Skim past my 3 star rating (it's a 3.5 rounded down), because there are friends and people I know who would give this 10 out of 10. It has some brilliant moments, and throughout the writing is tight and moves at a great pace. I got lost in the middle with understanding what was actually going on, but the last 3rd moved back to the original story and was easier to follow. For that reason alone, and just for the fact I think it could have trimmed 50 pages, I gave it a 3, but Beukes can clearly write and i'm certain others will absolutely love this. It is of course the 2011 winner of the prestigous Arthr C Clarke award.

Sometimes, not often but still sometimes, I find myself reading a book that makes me think I am missing an entire level of the story and that I am only reading it on the surface. This was one of those books.Zinzi December is a "Zoo". That is, she has an animal, a sloth to be precise. This isn't your ordinary everyday pet, but an externalisation of her guilt. Separation from her animal by any great distance causes unimaginable pain and the death of the animal would bring the blackness of the Undertow to claim her. The animals also bring with them a gift, each one unique, and in Zinzi's case this gift is the ability to see the lines of connecting forces between a person and their lost objects.In addition to reuniting people with their lost treasures (for a small feel of course), Zinzi owes a lot of money to some very undesirable people, is involved in writing 419 scam letters, and generally lives on the dubious side of legality. When the chance comes along to earn a lot of money for a seemingly straight forward job of tracking down the missing half of a twin brother and sister music act she jumps at the chance even though finding missing people is outside the scope of her specific ability and usually one of the things she avoids doing.Mixing voodoo type magic, a rather gripping crime story, along with the animals and the special abilities they grant, this story is quite hard to categorise but probably best described and an urban fantasy since it is set in a fairly recognisable alternative version of Johannesburg and South Africa.Presentation on the Kindle is rather good, but there were quite a few examples of two words being joined together - now I honestly don't know if these were errors in formatting, or if they were deliberate and a part of the story I was missing, but I personally found them distracting.Saying all that, I actually enjoyed this book, quite a lot in fact. After a reasonably slow start and taking some time to work out the significance of the animals, the middle part of the book really picked up the pace. I was afraid that the ending would leave me even more confused, but in actual fact it did a pretty good job of resolving the main plot line if not in explaining some of the less understandable parts.One thing to watch out for though is that the main story actually finishes at 90% on the Kindle status bar. This took me quite by surprise as I thought I had quite a bit left to read. After the story finishes there is a better than usual "I'd like to thank" from the author that also tells a little bit about the writing of the story and is actually worth reading. After this there was another surprise of three very high quality short stories that were winners of a  Moxyland  based competition run by the publisher. Two of these stories are actually exceptionally good!Overall: Four stars - I liked the author's imagination and style enough to add Moxyland to my "to be read" list even though I still feel like I was missing something. The short stories at the end of the book were a nice bonus too. Moxyland

Zoo City is a highly imaginative and creative story; a kind of modern version of cyberpunk - blending new cultural forms and urban dystopias into a rich kaleidoscope of colour and action. Indeed, it reminded me of William Gibson circa Virtual Light. This is no bad thing. Beukes is something of a 'word pimp' in her own words, fashioning some nice prose and a richly realised world. I suspect it is a book that needs a second reading to fully appreciate all the nuances of the story. There is so much going on, some of which is only obliquely explained, that it sometimes a little difficult to follow what is unfolding. And whilst the story is engaging and clever, it is also seemed a little uneven its telling. That said, Zinzi December is an interesting character that's fun to spend some time with and the book is populated with other colourful folk and subcultures. Overall, a entertaining read that works on different levels.