The Shining Girls A Novel

Beukes, and others, are at the frontier of a new South African fiction making a global impact. Put bluntly, six-figure sums are being lavished on young South African writers wired to a global idiom, a recent case in point being Sarah Lotz. South Africa’s canon still maintains its currency, but there is another concurrent and fast-growing realm in which writers and readers speak each to each beyond the limiting frontiers of national identity. It is not of course the universalism of our suffering and triumph that our writers have tactically engineered that matters here, but the transnational commercial idiom they have finally mastered. Novelist Michael Ondaatje described this generation some time ago as “international bastards”.

Psycho-geographies

The Shining Girls is set in Chicago. Beukes’s other novels are set in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The one she is working on next, called Broken Monsters, is set in Detroit. Cities are her psycho-geographies, cities as visceral as they are imagined. Given the virtuality of lived existences, the global refraction of the prism that makes us up is not surprising. What binds us are imagined communities. Our tenuous substance is networked, our sense of purpose an idea as quaint as it remains urgent. What Beukes returns to us is that very precariousness, that vulnerability and that urgency. “Only connect,” EM Forster declared, knowing then, as we know now, the enormity of the call and the stricken pathos that drives it.

In conversation with Beukes one senses not only the urgency to connect but the threat that dogs the yearned-for moment. A novel that pictures history on the move, in which time folds and events lose the ease of linearity, what forcefully emerges is concurrency: our post-postmodern time as the age of all ages. Deliberately shut off in 1993, The Shining Girls sidesteps the maw of the internet but nevertheless reminds us of a heterochronic world within worlds, of time drained of duration, which postmodern thought anticipated.

The Shining Girls is not a book of philosophy but a thriller in which a serial killer is the jumper between different times in the evolution of Chicago. The strategy allows the writer to gather certain nodal moments that define an age, then, in folding them, forces the reader to reflect on that which changes and that which remains the same. What becomes terrifying is the monotony and unchanging nature of life when it is conceived unimaginatively and hopelessly – this is the horror embodied in the serial killer, an obsessive compulsive fetishist incapable of acknowledging the value of life beyond its reduction to a preordained and monstrous pattern.

The killer’s victims, one of whom survives her preordained murder to become his antagonist, live lives that are spirited, open and unhampered by the sameness of time. The cruelty in the logic of the novel lies in the seeming triumphalism of sameness, but it is left to the survivor of a murder attempt to change all that. Here lies the force of Beukes’s novel. In conceiving a heroine who lives emphatically in the world, a woman who will not succumb to fate – history has “murdered” women for centuries – Beukes returns us to the driving force behind the writing, which is to reflect upon biopolitics and the historic and monstrous condemnation and damnation of women.

To read The Shining Girls as a feminist tract is, however, absurd. Mary Wollstonecraft’s campaign for the rights and vindication of women may prove the pulse of the work, but it is Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, who is its inspiration. It was Mary Shelley who embraced the monster; Mary Shelley who in examining the random piecing together of dead human matter and its monstrous consequence who returns us to the horror of serialising women, reducing them to objects and perforce to dead matter.

My point is not that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a novel about a serial killer but that it is the first science fiction thriller to examine the moral consequence of bringing the dead back to life, and inversely, as in the case of The Shining Girls, betraying life coolly and casually on behalf of an obsessive and morbid idea of death.

The window between life and death