Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
374 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 18 to February 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A promising and at times evocative novel bristling with the quills of strange magic, Zoo City is dragged down by an excess of cyberpunk (or is it crustpunk?) prose stylings. Living as we do in the dystopian cyberpunk future, I think we can safely discard the now-antique mash of slang and awkwardly futuristic acronyms first pieced together back in the '80s. Perhaps elsewhere it's different, but I've certainly never heard anyone use the term "SMS" in casual conversation -- we just call it "texting," here in this future age. More embarrassing is the tendency for this self-consciously "fresh" and "with it" narrative voice to drop instantly dated pop culture references: "If Huron's grooves were an LP, they would be playing the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'." I wince just quoting it.
Much of the novel is spent on what I would consider a thoroughly rote and uninteresting noir plot, tracking down a missing pop starlet, which turns out to be mostly a segue into a more interesting but rather rushed plot of magical murders and body part harvesting. The detailed setting and the exotic-to-me fantastical worldbuilding sustain Zoo City at a level well above what its stereotypical prose and initially formulaic plotting would ordinarily support.
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