レビュー要約

• 題材の明確さと読みどころの強さが評価されている。物語や論述の推進力があり、人物やテーマに踏み込む構成が読後の印象を残す。

レビュー

• Urban Fantasy Crime Story at its best!

  Great read! I usually don't finish novels sinc they tend to be rather foreseeable if you read a few thousand, but ZOO CITY is anything but. I enjoyed not only the fast-paced storyline with as many unexpected twists and turns, but also the characters and their life stories shimmering through the cracks of their hardcore, cool façades. The idea of the animals, as known from the Golden Compass by P. Pullman, but with a darker, more urban take, is a fresh take on contemp fantasy. Especially the intermittent documents about "zoos" are a nice way of explaining and not explaining at the same time. Lauren Beukes expects the reader to be a thinking person who doesn't need everything spelled out in detail to understand. Animals are such an integral part of the society in the book that it doesn't require an explanation. When you open the book, be prepared to finish it in one read!

• All it takes is one Afgan warlord to show up with a Penguin

  This is a really entertaining read. The world building is excellent, and Zinzi December is a great character. The dash of magic into the gritty Johannesburg setting works really well. The idea of being 'animalled' for crimes is very creative and well executed. I totally bought the burden and social stigma of being an "Apo" (Aposymbiot), the Zoo City ghetto, and Zinzi's dark side scamming innocents out of their life savings with 419 emails. I found the transition from "I don't do missing persons" to being a private eye a little under-explained. I think the author intended to show Zinzi getting sucked into the investigation reluctantly, but it didn't read like that, I never really got an insight into her motivations. But generally I liked that many aspects of the world weren't explained, it kept a real air of mystery to the story, i.e what crimes warrant an animal? What is the Undertow? What are the properties of the connection to the animal? Beukes takes an interesting approach to filling in details, she does it with a number of factual interstitials: IMDB entries, newspaper articles etc. I liked this idea: some of them were really well written and revealed detail in clever ways, others (like the IMDB entry and comments) were fairly annoying to read but still very believable. The writing is really good, full of ironic humour and witticisms: "All it takes is one Afgan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they knew goes right out the window." Some people have complained that the good guys don't win cleanly. I hate those sorts of endings, and while there is some raggedness to this ending I felt like the opposite, that most things got wrapped up a little too neatly. The climax also feels rather rushed and broke with the dark mysterious feel of the rest of the book for a Van-Damme-style finish. Contrast the brilliantly written off-balance dirty fight in the sewers with the final scenes: I wish the climax had been more in the style of the former. Some more choice quotes: "Nzambe aza na zamba te. God is not in the forest. Maybe He is too busy looking after sports teams or worrying about teenagers having sex before marriage. I think they take up a lot of His time." "They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow." of my reviews at g-readinglist.blogspot.com

• A rip-roaring psychedelic near-future dystopian detective noir. With animals.

  It’s dystopian near-future sci-fi. Or is it psychedelic fantasy set in the slums of Johannesburg? Actually it’s a detective noir. Or maybe an examination of fame and stardom and the messy cultural structures that underpin them. It’s all of those things at once, really. Zinzi is an ex-music journalist, ex-addict, and current email scammer for the mob. And she carries a sloth with her everywhere. In this world, since the ’80s, anyone who commits an awful crime - murder, especially - wakes up with an animal. A familiar, to which they are emotionally and psychically connected. Zinzi’s lover, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, has a mongoose. We meet people with butterflies, bears, dogs, and all kinds of birds. It’s a zoo out there. Hence the nickname for the slums - Zoo City, where the ‘animalled’ live. There’s an upside - along with your animal, you also get a magical voodoo-like talent, or power. But these are subtle gifts. Zinzi, for example, is able to sense - see, almost - connections to things people have lost. So she sets herself up as a low-rent private detective, finding lost things for people who pay cash and don’t ask questions. There’s a downside too. The undertow. If your animal is killed … the undertow takes you. A physical manifestation of death, hell, limbo, or something worse. The darkness comes alive and grabs you. Once all this is established, and you get used to the distinctly South African setting and smatterings of Afrikaans slang, Zinzi (of course) gets caught up in EVENTS. A teen pop star is missing. Her producer/manager hires Zinzi to find her. And everything starts to spiral. What I loved about Zoo City is the sense of solidity to the world. It’s not the usual flimsy stylistic layer on top of places we already know. This wrecked Joburg feels genuine. It has depth. There are stories everywhere, thrown away in a passing line here and there. A bartender you meet for five minutes leaves you wanting to know how they got there and what happened to the building they’re in. The homeless kids who opportunistically steal Zinzi’s phone turn into a genuine threat and the nearest she comes to dying in the whole sorry adventure. Her on-again-off-again Congolese lover has a whole novel’s worth of subplot in the scars across half his chest and the photos of his lost family he carries with him. And on top of all that, Zoo City is funny. Not that it’s a comedy - but realistically, dark humour is the only way people survive in bad times and the characters here take pride in verbally roughing each other up. Sharp tongues everywhere. Zoo City isn’t perfect. There’s a few gaping plot holes. There are clichés - especially when it comes to Muti, or ancient magic/religion. And the big action-movie ending gets a bit too carried away and ends up flashing past too quickly to be wholly certain who did what to whom. But … there’s an argument to say that’s right and proper. We’re seeing all this from over Zinzi’s shoulder and she was overwhelmed. As was her sloth. Anyway, I adored this book. And I’ll read it again.

• Exceptional

  A truly excellent novel, harsh, funny, sad, exciting. Nicely twisting plot, some great characters and an MC who is wonderful, although I sincerely hope I never meet her!

• A knockout blend of noir, cyberpunk, social commentary, and fantasy that tells a great story first and foremost

  Even before The Shining Girls really put her on the nationwide map, Lauren Beukes was creating quite the name for herself; having finally caught up on her acclaimed sophomore effort Zoo City, it's not hard to see why. Part cyberpunk thriller, part noir detective story, part strange fantasy, Zoo City is set in a Johannesburg not too far in the future, and follows a disgraced journalist who's kicked her drug habit and makes her money finding objects for people - well, that and running spammer schemes for the man who owns her debt. That's a solid enough foundation, and Beukes runs with it, creating an intricate plot that weaves together the darkest aspects of the pop music scene, the underclass structure of Johannesburg, and strong character work into a rich and satisfying story. But none of that touches on the most fascinating aspect of Zoo City, and that's the animals. See, in Beukes' version of the future, those who cross an undetermined moral line (most often killing, but it's implied that it's not as simple as that) find themselves linked to a strange, magical spirit animal. And while the animal often gives them a magical talent as well (say, the finding of lost objects), the social stigma is impossible to let go of, which allows Beukes to bring in factors about social strata, guilt, shame, and the stigma heaped upon those trying to leave their lives behind. That Zoo City does all this is wonderful enough; that it does it all while mainly focusing on telling a gripping, sharp, compelling story about abductions, violence, crime, and more is all the better. If Zoo City has a weak point, it's the ending, where Beukes rushes things a bit and ends up creating a fantastic finale that feels a bit out of nowhere and left me scratching my head; at the same time, the strong character work she's done and the anchoring of her tale in rich, fertile emotional ground makes the finale work, even if you have plot questions about how it all unfolds. Zoo City is a knockout, by any standards; the central premise is a fascinating one, the world is rich and fascinating (and Beukes' ability to build that world both through character and through articles/websites/etc., a la Watchmen, only helps that aspect work even better), and the characters hook us in on an emotional level. It's a fantastic read, and one that proves The Shining Girls was no fluke; this is a fantastic author, and one I'm definitely going to be reading more of as soon as possible.

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