Zoo City

The fierce storm outside is more wind than rain, I think. Fierce, but not fiercesome. Winter has moved in to Cape Town, early by a few days. I greet it from under a pile of blankets and (almost grossly clean) cat, book in hand. Except when I'm sleeping. Which is often because - let me whine for a second - fireants have moved into my throat glands and their armies are foraging in my brain. The book in hand: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. A book set in my home town, Joburg.

I started out determined to rubbish this book. Its pages were meant to be bubble wrap beneath my fingers. (I actually find the act of popping bubble wrap spine-shiveringly annoying, but pretend I don't.) Why? Because the praise of this book locally has been close to sycophantic. Because Beukes has published before, to barely a rustle. Because writing science fiction is oh-so trendy. I sound jealous. I probably am. But I am also sceptical.

I won't rubbish this book, but neither will I display it pride-of-place on my bookshelf. Writing science fiction, as with travel or Mills & Boone, is way more complicated than it looks. The genre is, um, generic. Add 'generic' to any literary jargon you can fish out: narrative structure, plot, plot devices, characters and setting. Meeting expectations means mix-and-matching conventions. This is a particularly niche market, after all. Well. It was.

Beukes hits the generic nail on its generic head. As per the acknowledgements, Ms Beukes spent much time researching inner-city Johannesburg, drugs, and other plot and setting necessities. It shows in the powerful descriptions of places and people as the protagonist Zinzi circles the city. Sometimes she visits the city I know and sometimes I am a tourist in her skin.

Zinzi is an animalled ex-drug addict living in inner-city Joburg. As inner as it gets (and not geographically): Hillbrow. The perfect place to unleash a time warp or black hole or washing machine (terrible joke). No spoilers here, in the early noughties of this novel, magic was unleashed. All those guilty of murder are now 'animalled', a la Philip Pullman's daemons. Hillbrow becomes - after you! - Zoo City! There is more!

The criminals also acquire 'shavi': a psychic power. Zinzi finds lost things, but not people. She makes this very clear for about twenty pages, until someone names the fee. She's not exactly principled. (She's too busy trying to blend in with the masses and forget her middle-class upbringing.) So Ms Investigator picks up the trail - actually, the deposit - and then the rest of the book happens.

And this where Ms Beukes and I part ways. Zoo City's magic is ill-defined - it was not there and then suddenly is, but it is only present to the animalled (I think), and no one really seems to use it or care about it. The animals are part of it and, oh, there's some vision of hell that manifests when an animal dies. (Sidenote: Call me what you like (Zinzi would), but I would be uncomfortable about murderers with familiars and super-powers that no one could explain.)

In science fiction, there is usually a rational explanation of why the core anomaly exists. Here, nada. So I thought about it. Midway into the novel, Zinzi visits a traditional healer (although what this adds to the plot except for allowing her phone to be stolen, I don't know). Ah, I eureka-ed, so tradition is backlashing on modernity? Hold up. So you're telling me, um, that tradition and science are not compatible?

Strike 1. Rather refrain from striking the generic nail on the generic head for one heartbeat.

Science fiction characters are often two-dimensional. All good and well. Despite this, they usually experience a moment of potential growth. Some conflict with their - either withered or unused - values, that determines the resolution. Zinzi does not. I think. Maybe I missed it.

Zinzi is cynical, bitter and selfish, and it's not clear what she is fighting for - which is an answer in itself - because every science-fiction protagonist is fighting for something, whether consciously or through our omniscience. There is room for a fight in Zoo City: infringements on equality, freedom and basic human rights, or the journey of the heroine to self-acceptance. At the end, Zinzi is still cynical, bitter and selfish, but she has a car.

Strike 2. Same deal.

Tally: What Beukes wins on the swings, she loses on the roundabout.

Usually, I try to decode a story by comparing the introduction and conclusion. All that changes here is the setting and Zinzi's destination. And the number of scars she has. All we as readers have to fall back on are the conventions of science fiction. In Zoo City, science is replaced by magic. A bastard child of science and tradition, that in turn falls back on its stronger siblings - plot and structure. But are they strong enough to support us both over time?