Zoo City

How do you take a very well written book with fantastic worldbuilding and great underlying concepts and bog it down? You whiff it on the plotting.

This is a well written, well researched book where so much thought went into building a realistic world, dripping with style and grime, and everything just works, that the plot remained on the backburner the entire time.

By the time we're in the final act of the story, it was almost like the author remembered “shit, this has to be going somewhere!” So it's a mad dash back to something from earlier in the book, then clumsily linking it to the middle of the book and viola, plot! I do this thing where I read through Goodreads reviews to get a feeling for what other readers are saying about a book, and once I slog through the bold text, GIFs and whatnot, it seems like I'm not the only one who noticed this. Some are far more forgiving and claim it was the intent, but ehh.

Writers can feel intent and when a plot is being rushed or cobbled together. Beukes was so immersed in this world she created that there was a struggle to give us a reason to be here, with these characters, in this setting. There are plenty of novels where they diverge from the original path, go off on side tangents and feel like they lose the plot completely, but they're also oozing with intent.

There were many subplots presented in the book that could've been the main plot, in fact, and it would've been a stronger book. Her boyfriend's whole plot? That was super interesting! Her sketchy job plot? That was interesting, too! Her ex the tabloid journo? That was pretty interesting! Instead, it turned to a throwaway set of antagonistic characters from one of the subplots and chose that as the hill to die on.

None of those characters were that fleshed out and while the last few chapters were exciting and well-written, there was this feel of an editor's hand (or many!) at play saying “Lauren, we need there to be a plot here.”

Trust me, I've done this before.

Sometimes you can see the guilt that people carry around with them. You don't know what they did - or sometimes even just what they think they did - but it's obvious from their posture and body language that there's something dark in their past. In Zoo City, Lauren Beukes takes that idea to a supernatural extension: people's past sins become visible as animal companions that follow them around, and which cause them psychic trauma if they become separated. Zinzi, our protagonist, has a sloth.

More importantly, though, Zinzi has two special abilities: she's really good at finding things, and she's really good at writing emails in which she pretends to be deposed Nigerian royalty. She uses both of these to grift her way through life, which is how we meet her at the beginning of the book.

There's a blurb on the cover of this book that has William Gibson declare it as “Very very good”. It seemed an odd choice before I read the book - I don't doubt Gibson's interest in it, but it's “urban fantasy” and he's oh-so science fiction, so it seemed odd at first. Having read the book, it's not odd at all: Beukes is clearly influenced by Gibson's street-level style and his attitude toward technology. What she does better than Gibson, though, is create a good sense of place throughout the story. The Johannesburg suburbs that Zinzi travels through - both “Zoo City”, the slum for animalled people that she lives in, and the ritzier neighbourhoods that she travels to in her quest for redemption.

Zoo City is a slick, funny, exciting novel that stands out as one of the best pieces of fiction I've read in the past few years. It left me looking forward to what Ms. Beukes has planned next.