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A review by batrock
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
4.0
The four is more for the concept than the execution; Zoo City's plot is sketchy and abrupt, and time is a confused construct. The setting and the conceit make up for most of it.
In a world where murderers have familiars (sometimes literally) dogging them, Zoo City follows the travails of disgraced ex-journalist and recovering drug addict Zinzi December and the Sloth (capitalisation Beukes') that rides on her back. Zinzi makes ends meet by finding lost things, but an ill-timed murder leads to a missing persons case, and then things get progressively weirder until the climax sneaks up and then disappears.
I didn't really like Beukes' previous effort, Moxyland, much at all, but concepts don't get much better than magical sloths that cause their owners to become social lepers. Interspersed through the novel are background materials on the phenomenon of the "animalled", but these never overburden the novel with too much information; Beukes keeps enough of her rules mysterious enough to make the entire thing fascinating.
It's a pity that all of these ideas and concepts can't quite support Zinzi December, who rushes from one set-up to the next until arriving at the final confrontation almost out of nowhere. The bond between Zinzi and Sloth feels genuine, but Zinzi's relationship to illicit substances literally distorts the time-frame of the novel to the point that I couldn't tell if months had passed or if the whole novel was contained in a week.
When it actually matters, too little goes unsaid, and that's how the novel ends.
Despite structural integrity flaws and occasional character qualms, Zoo City is vibrant and intriguing, without coming close to the crushingly fatalistic conflagration of Moxyland. Recommended as something to knock over in a day or two.
Post script: I really should mark this down for "I can haz murder weapon?" Instead I will leave that sentence there as a dire warning.
In a world where murderers have familiars (sometimes literally) dogging them, Zoo City follows the travails of disgraced ex-journalist and recovering drug addict Zinzi December and the Sloth (capitalisation Beukes') that rides on her back. Zinzi makes ends meet by finding lost things, but an ill-timed murder leads to a missing persons case, and then things get progressively weirder until the climax sneaks up and then disappears.
I didn't really like Beukes' previous effort, Moxyland, much at all, but concepts don't get much better than magical sloths that cause their owners to become social lepers. Interspersed through the novel are background materials on the phenomenon of the "animalled", but these never overburden the novel with too much information; Beukes keeps enough of her rules mysterious enough to make the entire thing fascinating.
It's a pity that all of these ideas and concepts can't quite support Zinzi December, who rushes from one set-up to the next until arriving at the final confrontation almost out of nowhere. The bond between Zinzi and Sloth feels genuine, but Zinzi's relationship to illicit substances literally distorts the time-frame of the novel to the point that I couldn't tell if months had passed or if the whole novel was contained in a week.
When it actually matters, too little goes unsaid, and that's how the novel ends.
Despite structural integrity flaws and occasional character qualms, Zoo City is vibrant and intriguing, without coming close to the crushingly fatalistic conflagration of Moxyland. Recommended as something to knock over in a day or two.
Post script: I really should mark this down for "I can haz murder weapon?" Instead I will leave that sentence there as a dire warning.