A girl and her Sloth

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C CLARKE AWARD 2011

There's a blurb by William Gibson ("Very *very* good!") on the front cover of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, and that seems appropriate.  Even though Zoo City is tagged as urban fantasy, we are definitely in Gibson-like terrain.  If it's not quite cyber-punk, it's the fantasy equivalent. 

Moxyland

Which isn't surprising.  Beukes' first novel , Moxyland, was clearly the great-grandchild of Virtual Light or Pattern Recognition.  Set in a South Africa that could be today -- or could be a future so near that it's out of date before you finish the book -- it features hackers, streamcast blogs, 'sponsorbabies' (nanotech implanted living advertisements), revolutionaries hiding out in the inner-city 'Sprawl', corporations that are indistinguishable from the government .... Charles Stross called it, "The larval form of a new kind of science fiction munching its way out of the intestines of the wasp-paralyzed caterpillar of cyberpunk."  Which seems like a very cyberpunk kind of praise to me.  

China Town

This kind of fiction is as much a descendant of Raymond Chandler as it is of science fiction.  Neo-noir plots set on the fringes of society (but always involving the decadent and degenerate rich).  You could digitally re-master China Town, adding mutants and high tech hackers, giving Faye Dunaway a chic haircut and computer plug in the back of her neck, and it would all work just fine.  It's never been about the plot.  It's about the mean streets (or the mean paths of cyberspace) and the hard-edged, damaged-but-untarnished hero who's honest eye shows us the world we've made for ourselves.  Chandler himself complained while trying to write the screenplay to The Big Sleep that he couldn't keep the plot straight.  And really, we could care less.

The Big Sleep

One thing's for sure:  Beukes is a good writer, with a sharp feeling for character and world building.  Zoo City, where the fringe of society survive on the borders of the law, is a place the police only come heavily armed and the respectable citizens don't come at all (or don't admit when they do.)  It is set in an alternate version of modern day Johannesburg, which shares our history -- but only up to a point.  This world also experienced (sometime in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, apparently) something called "The Shift".  There are hundreds of different explanations of what it is and what it did, but the world is unmistakably different.  And the same.  Africa is still Africa, torn by civil wars, plagued by AIDS, and South Africa, though far from perfect, is the haven the refuges flee to.  Zinzi December, is a former journalist and former junkie (she doesn't seem very proud of either) sent to prison for killing (or causing the death of her brother), who now makes her living finding lost things and writing stories for 419 scams.  Those are the kind familiar from your junk e-mail box, lamenting the sufferings of poor orphans and misplaced Nigerian royalty and promising great rewards to anyone kind enough to help (by sending money).  Zinzi is very good at tugging the heartstrings of the gullible.

Virtual Light

The most visible effect of the Shift is the appearance of 'the animalled'.   All over the world, those who commit acts of deadly violence -- it doesn't seem to draw a distinction between deliberate murder and accidental manslaughter -- are gifted or cursed with a mysterious animal familiar.  They just show up, shortly after the incident.  No matter where the person is.  Even in prison.  And they aren't necessarily local animals.   Even their type seems to be random, although some claim that they reflect hidden aspects of the person's soul.  Zinzi has a sloth.

Along with the animal comes a special power or mashavi -- magical or psychic depending on your point of view.  Zinzi for instance, can find lost items.  In fact, she can see the threads that connect a person to the things he has lost, writhing around him like umbilical cords or tentacles.  It's not always a comfortable gift, but it allows her to function as a low-rent detective. 

I won't even try to summarize the plot.  Just like a novel by Chandler or Gibson, the plot is complicated, perverse and isn't going to stick with most readers very long.  It might not even hold up if you think about it too closely.   As I said before, plot has never been the point of this kind of fiction.  It's ultimately Zoo City, it's inhabitants, the strange world of the animalled, and the glimpses we get of the effect of the Shift on the wider world, that are fascinating here.  And they are very interesting indeed.  Beukes approaches the whole idea of her magical world with an almost scientific attitude -- she offers us multiple theories that never quite completely explain what has happened.

Pattern Recognition

I sometimes think that the biggest difference between science fiction and fantasy is the direction in which they face.  Fantasy, even urban fantasy set in the present, is always looking backwards at the past.  Science fiction looks forward, toward the future, sometimes with hope, sometimes with fear -- usually with a mix.  If that's true, then Zoo City, despite its magic powers and mysterious animal familiars, is firmly in the science fiction mindset.  It's a portrait of a society dealing with change that comes too rapidly and that no one really understands. 

I must add a word of warning about the book's ending.  It is over-the-top violent and bloody and many readers (lovers of animals, humans included) might find it disturbing.  It's not uncommon in this type of story, for the ending to be the weakest point of the book. Part of the problem is main characters who are essentially observers, and who in the end don't really have much effect on the events they witness.  A bigger part is just what I keep saying -- the plot doesn't really matter, and when we get down to the business of tying up all the loose ends (or more often, not tying them up) that becomes a little too obvious. Gibson often suffers from that problem too.  (As did Chandler). In the best cases though -- and Zoo City is certainly one of the best -- the ending doesn't override the pleasures that come before it.

Gibson is right.  Zoo City is very good.




If you enjoy Books and Beasts, you might also enjoy our sister blog, Birdland West, which focuses on birds and wildlife around West Seattle, in Washington State.



 

Two Dogs In Search of a Master

 

With all the exciting new technologies at the movies these days -- CGI and 3D being the most obvious -- I think it might be time to revise my personal list of "Books I'd Love to See Made into Movies".  No one in Hollywood is beating down my door for recommendations, but it seems like a cool way to kick off the Summer Season, so in the next week or so I'll share some of  my selections -- why I love the book, and why I think it could be a great a movie.  Today, my number one choice:

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

Everyone knows Watership Down, a great book which was made into a movie years ago -- and could be remade today, beautifully I think.  But the Richard Adams novel I love -- one of the books that has had a tremendous influence on me -- is The Plague Dogs.  It is the story of Snitter and Rowf, who escape from a medical research facility where they have been involved in horrifying experiments, and flee into the wilderness seeking freedom.  Rowf has never known anything but the labs, but Snitter was once the beloved companion of a "true master".  Early in the book, while they are still in the labs, they talk about humans and masters:

"A dog stands firm," said Rowf sharply.  "A dog never refuses whatever a man requires of him.  That's what a dog's for ...As dogs we're born to suffering.  It's a bad world for animals -- "

"Rowf, you owe them nothing -- nothing -- they're not masters ... Rowf, we're going to escape!  Both of us, through that door -- "

"There might be something worse through that door," said Rowf ....

"Think of the whitecoats, Rowf -- what you told me -- peering down into the tank and watching you.  They aren't masters, believe me;  I've had a master -- I know.  If we could only get out of here we might find a master -- who can tell? -- a proper pack leader.  Isn't it worth a try?"

Snitter has his own tragic past.  He is convinced that he killed his beloved Master, and after that his owner's family sold him off for medical research.  That guilt -- plus the effects of the experimentation he went through in the labs -- weighs heavily on Snitter's mind.  He struggles at times for sanity.  

But the two dogs do escape, and with the help of a fox, they learn to survive in the wild.  Meanwhile, the human world is up in arms.  The owners of the laboratory play up the threat of contamination, and a young reporter eager for a big story labels the two canine friends "plague dogs".  Soon all sorts of people -- some friendly and sympathetic, some definitely not -- are searching for Snitter and Rowf.

The Plague Dogs is an exciting, suspenseful adventure story that will hold any reader's interest.  But it is also much deeper.  The book sits astride a curious divide -- between "realistic" novels about animals and the great fantasy tradition of talking animal books (of which Watership Down is one of the best).  Snitter and Rowf are fully realized characters, who think and communicate with each other eloquently (as does their friend the Fox).  Yet from the human's point of view the behavior and condition of the animals is starkly realistic. Miraculously, this seam never shows.  In the world of the book (as perhaps, in our world) the realities seem to fit.    Adams has taken the conventions of the talking animal story and used them to create a novel that is part adventure story, part passionate broadside against the abuse of animals and the blindness of humans.

But it is finally Rowf and Snitter who hold us.  Maybe the two greatest canine characters in all of English literature.  Richly imagined beings -- scarred but noble -- with complete inner lives who also never fail to convince us of their dog-ness.  Adam's gift in rendering two such heart wrenching heroes makes this book great.  Their peril -- and through their eyes and hearts the peril of the entire animal world in the face of man's blindness -- drive us along through a terrifying, exciting, heart breaking and ultimately triumphant book. 

(One of the thought experiments I like to use when thinking about animal characters is:  If the descendants of these animals some day become literate, and can look back on our portrayal of them, how will they feel about it?  I think most dogs would love Rowf and Snitter as much as I do.)

The Incredible Journey

The Plague Dogs, because of the way it combines all the threads of animal writing , is the heir not only of Watership Down (a heroic fantasy in animal guise), but of The Wind in the Willows, The Incredible  Journey, and the "realistic" dog stories of the mid-twentieth century (Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Lassie Come-Home, etc.) -- and, more indirectly, the tradition of "social issue" novels that goes back through Sinclair Lewis to Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Richard Adams has never really received the place he deserves in modern literature.  And The Plague Dogs is his greatest work.

Animated Movie Version

The Plague Dogs was made as an animated movie in 2004 (originally released in the UK and in a heavily edited version in the US -- see it here and here), but I think its high time it gets the full feature film treatment.  Done right -- by a Director who would flinch from neither sentiment nor horror -- The Plague Dogs could also be the best animal movie ever.  I would be there on opening night to see it.

###

Traveler

And for anyone who loves Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, Richard Adams is also the author of several other very interesting books.  Notably: Shardik, a fantasy about the great hunter Kelderek who pursues the nearly divine Great Bear Shardik  "across the length and breadth of a fabled world"; Maia, a more human focused (and wonderfully exotic) epic fantasy, set in the same universe (apparently) as Shardik; and especially for Books and Beast readers, Traveler, a delightful retelling of the life of Robert E. Lee from the perspective of his faithful horse.  I encourage everyone to search these books out.

Shardik

 

If you enjoy Books and Beasts, you might also enjoy our sister blog, Birdland West, which focuses on birds and wildlife around West Seattle, in Washington State.