Zoo City

[claidheamhmor]

Many years back, one of the D&D players that played in one of my many D&D campaigns was a pretty teenager named Lauren Beukes; she moved on to university in Cape Town, became a journalist, and then started writing books, first Moxyland and then Zoo City.

The blurb for Zoo City reads:

"Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things. To save herself, she has to find the hardest thing of all... the truth. Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a client turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons. Being hired by famously reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass, marked by their animals, live in the shadow of the undertow. Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the underbelly of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own. Set in a wildly re-imagined Johannesburg, it swirls refugees, crime, the music industry, African magic and the nature of sin together into a heady brew."

Last week, she won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in the UK during 2010, for Zoo City. That's certainly moving up in the world! Incidentally, the artist who did the cover, Joey Hi-Fi, won Best Art at the British Science Fiction Awards.

Lauren Beukes Talks (Channel24)
The Arthur C Clarke awards: why Lauren Beukes deserved to win (Guardian.co.uk)

I read Zoo City last year, and I must admit that I had some rather mixed feelings about it. On the one hand: it was really, really innovative, with its focus on Johannesburg slums and society, and many of the concepts were fascinating. The research done was extensive, and one could really get a feel for the environment. In many ways, it was very gritty and very real.

On the other hand, I found it very choppy and confusing (even for a native Joburger who understands a lot of the slang), and very difficult to get into. Reading it was quite hard work. ereneth, what did you think? Have you lent it to ihlanya yet?