Zoo City

A few weeks ago, just after it won this year's Arthur C. Clarke award, I read Lauren Beukes' Zoo City. Set in a fantasy version of contemporary South Africa, it imagines a world where magic works and where some people have animal familiars. So far, so Pullman, except that in Beukes' world animalling only happens to people who've killed another person, providing an easy way to tell whether someone is a member of the underclass.

The plot follows Zinzi December, a former music journalist, as she tries to carve out a new life among the outcasts of Zoo City. When her talent for finding lost things brings her to the attention of a reclusive music producer, she finds herself caught up in a noirish search for a missing teenage starlet. Using the case as an excuse Zinzi makes contact with some of her pre-fall friends, obviously hoping to reboot her career, only to be treated with a mixture of incomprehension and patronising condescension. After an initial period of misguided probing, Zinzi starts to uncover signs that the investigation is more complicated than it seems and that her employers seem to be setting her up to take the wrap for something else entirely.

Zoo City benefits from some particularly strong world building. The version of South Africa that it presents is clearly contemporary — there's even a passing reference to Lady Gaga — but with its animals and magic, it's clearly a fantasy albeit one where the fantastic elements stand-in for more mundane problems like AIDS and post-apartheid inequalities. It's also nice to read a well realised urban fantasy novel that isn't set in an American or European metropolis and makes no apologies for not being set in America or Europe.

The details of animalling although shrouded in mystery, the book features a number of journalistic interludes that attempt to explain the history and context of the phenomenon. Thus, we learn that it first came to public attention when a high profile terrorist was seen to be accompanied by a penguin in a flak jacket. We discover that the animals are granted by a mysterious force called the Undertow and that when an animal is killed, the Undertow appears to take its person away somewhere (popularly assumed to be hell). And we learn through an excerpt from a pretentious academic paper that the Undertow might be a necessary part of the physical universe; a "quantum manifestation of non-existence, a psychic equivalent of dark matter that indeed serves as a counterpoint to, and bedrock for, the principle of existence." From which it's painfully apparent that the worst excesses of post-modernism seem to have made through to Beukes' parallel universe.

Zinzi is a strong and generally likeable protagonist who manages to grow into herself over the course of events. From the snippets of backstory she lets slip, it's pretty clear that, pre-fall, she was almost completely irresponsible and unwilling to accept the consequences of any of her actions. By the start of the book she's been forced by prison and rehab to put the worst of her former self behind her, but she's still living day-to-day, finding lost things and writing 419 emails to service her outstanding drug debts. But after she confronts her past and realises that there is no way she's going to get her former life back, she starts to come to terms with her existence and the seriousness of her situation. But her journey towards integrity isn't entirely smooth. After a bad fight with her boyfriend, she falls off the wagon; but rather than dwell on her misfortunes, she picks herself up, heads to the nearest NA meeting and gets back on the path to recover.

With some great world building, a mean Chandleresque plot, a strong lead, and some sharp writing, it's not hard to see why Zoo City scooped the 2011 Clarke.