The Shining Girls A Novel

Like the red fretwork of her murder wall, Beukes’s conversation keeps returning to “women burning with potential”, women snagged in the brute “reality of violence”, a far cry from the generic noir image of “a beautiful blonde splayed on a floor legs akimbo and one high heel cast aside, blonde hair in a pool of blood”.

Beukes knows her noir porn but she also knows how to read the entrails of a grim truth and how, in this morally bankrupt world, it’s become difficult to separate the two. Which is why she fights to make the writing more real “because violence is real, we disconnect with that, we don’t see what it is”.

“I want to be a David Mitchell; a Margaret Atwood,” she says. “Hopefully my audience will follow me wherever I want to go.” All the indicators suggest that she has no difficulty inspiring her readers. Beukes’s feral splicing of genres reflects a world unimpressed by categories.

That said, no “talking squids from outer space” pop up in Beukes’s fiction. The remark is Atwood’s. Made on the back of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, it irked science fiction fans who thought it dismissive of the genre. Pitting speculative fiction against science fiction, Atwood’s point was that the former “could really happen”. Well … what actually can happen is surely up for grabs, though Atwood tried to mollify the justifiably rankled with her next morph, “social science fiction”. Like “speculative fiction”, social science fiction works for figuring out Beukes, a child of the remix and the mash-up.

“Contemporaneity is and always has been history on the move. A history that we witness, or engender, but whose finality we cannot ponder. A history that makes us rethink ourselves, not in reference to one fixed outmoded identity but as protean beings with multiple changeable identities.” These words are art critic Simon Njami’s and they trigger a trip switch when I read Beukes.

The monstrousness that stalks life

Beukes’s novels are otherworldly yet cannily on point as “ghostings” of the world we live in: real yet bizarre; visceral yet sublime. As for talking squids, they do assume a telling edge in James Cameron and Katherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days, which Beukes admires, and an inspiration for Moxyland. Wired to the brain, the squid teleports the consumer to a parallel dimension – a business person becomes the blonde babe in the shower he so fervently wishes to be, which is sweet. But when the squid becomes the device through which a rape victim assumes the rapist’s experience it is anything but. Strange Days depicts one of the most frightening evocations of rape as a killing of spirit and volition: the victim is so utterly dispossessed of agency she cannot even experience her own pain or death.

Atwood, Cameron and Bigelow are key inspirations for Beukes and it is easy to understand why: Atwood’s powerful conceits, Cameron’s rich plots, and the frisson and pace of Bigelow’s direction are vital elements in a Beukes novel. Moreover, their women are powerful, intelligent, driven and occupy the vortex of the drama. The worlds they conjure force us to reckon with the perversity at the core of the civilisation that defines us. Furiously politicised, unrelenting in the challenges they pose, damning of the monstrousness that stalks life, these artists in their populist idiom bring us back to the power of fiction to make the world a better place.

In the 1930s, George Orwell penned an essay titled Good Bad Books, meaning “books that remain readable when more serious productions have perished”.

“Who has worn better,” Orwell asked. “Conan Doyle or [George] Meredith?” Orwell’s answer is Doyle, an author “able to identify himself with his imagined characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve”. Orwell’s point is that “intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a storyteller, as it would be to a music hall comedian”.

One need not agree that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf, but there is something to be celebrated in the idea of “good bad fiction”. Dare I say it: the South African novel in its classic mode is dead, by which I mean the novel of great ideas fed through the mill of colonial taste, disaffection and distemper. Which returns me forcefully to the writing of Beukes, an artist who breaks the contemplative guilt-stricken mould while holding on to the core quest to redefine the aggrieved human condition that defines that tradition. Here Beukes reminds me that she is joined by Jamala Safari, Kgebetli Moele, Thando Mgqolozana, Zukiswa Wanner, Sifiso Mzobe, Diane Awerbuck, Henrietta Rose-Innes and crime fiction writers Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, who “all interrogate the now in exciting and cool ways”.