The window between life and death
What Beukes does show us is how a premeditated murder operates; the chilling care for a girl child’s beauty and its casual annihilation years later. What links Mary Shelley to Lauren Beukes is the power of imagination directed to the window period between life and death, a window rendered pornographic and obscene. It is in this window between life and death, which the killer controls, that the sickness of the book is located. There is no mystery, no gnawing unsettlement that the reader may experience in not knowing when the killer will strike. On the contrary, we are privy to the sordid frisson of pleasure the killer experiences in the anticipation of the moment, we are ground down by the inevitability of it all, until one woman, the avenging angel, survives the killer’s brutal logic. And it is here, in this critical turnaround, that the horror of predestination is challenged, the agency of selfhood championed.
If The Shining Girls was mere gore porn it would be unsatisfactory; if it was a mere moral tract similarly so. To capture the monstrousness of femicide – the unrelenting transhistorical slaughter of women – Beukes chose a form, social science fiction, that cannily expresses our ills; our unremitting failure to love, care for or cherish the lives of others. Beukes provides a solution – the killer is destroyed – but she nevertheless leaves us with a bitter taste that, unlike the taste of gall at the close of The Master of Petersburg, is a taste of and a taste for death. We come to know death intimately, how swiftly all we value and regard highly can be casually extinguished. We are left with the remorseless annihilation of beauty, an annihilation not only of young, industrious and promising women, but also the annihilation of great human spirit.
It is this core annihilation that defines Shelley’s Frankenstein. This annihilation, the consequence of the abandonment of ethics, of justice, is one we experience every day. Indeed, such is the extent of the abandonment that we no longer believe it is possible to right a wrong, recognise beauty or hold on to what is precious. The evil genius of Beukes’s serial killer is that he can still see what is good and, therefore, what can be destroyed while we, inured, emptied, mere husks, know and value little. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard remarked that we live in a world more visible than the visible; such is the saturation and the bloated emptiness of our world, we can no longer disinter, regulate or manage the force field that defines us. In such a hyper-real, saturated world, how do we mediate, reflect or act?
Beukes’s social science fiction raises these questions. The plus, of course, is that she also entertains through novels that are intelligent, hyper-conscious, worldly, intimate, enduring and popular. There is no doubt in my mind how desperately we need writers who can show us who we are, invoke Rainer Maria Rilke’s call to change our lives, and pin us down reflectively to the cruel bind we find ourselves in. What gives Beukes’s writing its power is threefold: the prose is scintillating, the dialogue utterly convincing and the plot riveting.
Beukes displays all the attributes of a postmodern hybrid. Her disregard for pure categories, her queering of heteronormative values, her scepticism of flash style, her distrust of mind removed from things, her sensuous and visceral flair, all forcefully return us to a world as gritty as it is conceptual. A maverick and a glow girl, Beukes brings a heady mix of sex and ethics to the world of South African fiction. Trained as a journalist, Beukes developed the instinct for detail early on. All importantly, the details are perverse, twisted, forcing the reader to reconfigure perceptual norms, which is why Beukes is seen as cultish, avant-garde and hip. Here the package comes in the way of the substance. The worlds she depicts suggest such a cool ghetto, but her reach is far greater and far more penetrating. Beukes’s fiction literally shines.
She starts out with the big questions: What is Africa? What does contemporaneity represent within this geographical entity? Her solution has been to estrange these questions all the more and, in the estranging discover a new global commons, a new transcultural nexus, in which cities, as generic as they are unique, set the stage for her brave new worlds.
Like her transatlantic accent, Beukes’s fictive world straddles continents; you can’t fix her. After Pico Iyer, Beukes is a “global soul”; after Donna Harraway a kind of cyborg who moves effortlessly between the real and fantastical.
This article first appeared in the Mail & Gaurdian
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Moxyland
Zoo City
Published in 2013 by Umuzi an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1966/003153/07
First Floor, Wembley Square, Solan Road,
Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
[email protected] www.randomstruik.co.za
© 2013 Lauren Beukes
www.laurenbeukes.com
Lauren Beukes has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2013
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-4152-0201-2 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0504-4 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0505-1 (PDF)
Cover design by Joey Hi-Fi
Photographs by Lauren Beukes, Nico Krijno and Robert-David Jones
Text design by 128Design
Set in FFScala
For Matthew
Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
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