This was one of the books I got for my birthday by an
author that I had not read before and taking the Amazon recommendation. I
enjoyed the first one (Windup Girl) very much and this one was very different
from the start.
The feel of this story was in keeping with the subject
matter, outsiders, criminals and dropouts, characters with their own way of
talking, with different morals and values and a pragmatic approach to problems
that befall them. Some of the references were lost on me being unfamiliar with
the use of South African slang or tribal cultures, but still it was an exciting
and exotic world that was brought to life and the Animaled concept was fresh
and interesting.
This was a fascinating read.
‘Zinzi has a Sloth on
her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when
a little old lady 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
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 and
their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.
Instead, it catapults
Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be
forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own’.
Another unknown for me this author has a unique voice
and I was quickly immersed into his strange and twisted world. The story played
heavily on the drug induced virtual (vurt) reality and gang culture in a
disturbing and psychedelic roller coaster ride that made you feel you were
tripping along with the characters.
Some of the twisted mutation imagery and shocking
character attitudes jarred and highlighted the dystopian aspects of this world.
A world that was left mostly unexplained as the main characters concentrated on
struggling to survive on the fringes of society leaving us to wonder on how it
all came to be.
A baffling and exciting read.
‘Take a trip in a
stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents,
hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for
the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But
Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission
to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As
the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his
current reality behind.’
Different again I hadn’t realised until I started to
write this review that this author was also responsible for the satirical The
Soddit a parody of the Hobbit that I read many years before. This is much
different and although it has satirical and humorous passages all through it
there is a more sophisticated story and intriguing idea carrying this work
along.
I like the more measured pace of this story that plays
well with the elderly main character, an anti-heroic ‘ironist’ who is taken
from his quiet and drab life that he has resigned himself to and thrust into a
strange new world where his preconceptions are constantly challenged as are the
reader’s as we are drawn ever deeper into the bizarre.
This book has some wonderful twists and turns to it
and the Russian flavour to the dialogue, the superbly stylised characters and
the way the author lures you into believing in the unbelievable makes this well
worth the read.
‘Russia, 1946, the
Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science
fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the
defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the
Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it
purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story
about aliens poised to invade earth… I
want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props
and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is
defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet
Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!' The little group of
writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it.
But then new orders
come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his
mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in
their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the
changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the
survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The
story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true…’
