Zoo City

Lauren Beukes has written an engaging thriller that defies categorization. It's urban fantasy with Johannesburg's Hillbrow taking center stage, a strong female protagonist, an interesting concept of the "animalled" featuring magic, and the dark, gritty streets of contemporary urban South Africa. Nothing is quite as it seems, those who commit crimes get "animalled," a concept explained in some of the news reports, online forums, and emails that comprise some of the chapters. Zinzi December, the novel's protagonist, has a sloth for her animal, and while not literally glued together, the magical bond that connects human to their animal is so strong they cannot part way, that is, not without using magical means.

While the novel is quite accurate to the realities of contemporary Johannesburg's Hillbrow (the daily violence, lack of police protection, gang wars, squatters, and refugees from other African countries), and it uses elements of romance, crime thriller, science fiction, and fantasy, it also endeavors to incorporate muti into the narrative. This is dangerous because it can, perhaps, be used to promote negative, outdated stereotypes of Africa as full of superstitious cannibals who believe in witchcraft. The complexities of witchcraft and muti murders in South Africa is too difficult to explain in this novel, and one sees how it ties with the "animalled" concept and Undertow, but can leave the reader with negative stereotypes of Africa. Nevertheless, in a world where animals become magically "tied" to those who commit crimes and the world responds in kind with a combination of discrimination, superstition, and magic (mashavi, the word used in southern Africa), perhaps the retention of muti beliefs in the use of human and animal body parts remains relevant (hey, even non-black characters also use it).

The novel concludes in an open-ended way, with some redemption possible for Zinzi. Ultimately, the novel seems to be about just that, Zinzi restoring her moral balance in a dysfunctional world known. As one might expect, the novel functions as allegory for apartheid in some respects, too, given that those who are "animalled" are segregated in "Zoo City," a fictionalized neighborhood in Hillbrow. Housing segregation, employment discrimination, and the reality of life for poor South Africans haunt the narrative, allowing Beukes to make light social commentary on the social discord in Johannesburg. I will have to follow Beukes's work for some time to read such an interesting science fiction story set in South Africa.