The Shining Girls

by By (author) Lauren Beukes

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

  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

  umuzi@randomstruik.co.za

  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

  Table of Contents

  Author biography

  Harper 17 July 1974

  Harper 20 November 1931

  Kirby 18 July 1974

  Harper 22 November 1931

  Kirby 9 September 1980

  Harper 22 November 1931

  Kirby 30 July 1984

  Harper 24 November 1931

  Kirby 3 January 1992

  Mal 29 April 1988

  Harper 29 April 1988

  Dan 10 February 1992

  Harper 28 December 1931

  Kirby 2 March 1992

  Harper any time

  Dan 2 March 1992

  Zora 28 January 1943

  Kirby 13 April 1992

  Harper 4 January 1932

  Dan 9 May 1992

  Willie 15 October 1954

  Dan 1 June 1992

  Harper 26 February 1932

  Kirby 23 March 1989

  Dan 24 July 1992

  Kirby 24 July 1992

  Mal 16 July 1991

  Kirby 22 November 1931

  Harper 22 November 1931

  Harper 20 November 1931

  Kirby 2 August 1992

  Dan 2 August 1992

  Harper 16 October 1954

  Kirby 11 August 1992

  Harper 24 March 1989

  Alice 4 July 1940

  Kirby 27 August 1992

  Harper 10 April 1932

  Dan 11 September 1992

  Harper no time

  Margot 5 December 1972

  Kirby 19 November 1992

  Harper 16 August 1932

  Kirby 14 January 1993

  Harper 1 May 1993

  Catherine 9 June 1993

  Jin-Sook 23 March 1993

  Kirby 23 March 1993

  Harper 20 August 1932

  Alice 1 December 1951

  Harper 1 December 1951

  Kirby 12 June 1993

  Harper 28 March 1987

  Harper 12 June 1993

  Dan 13 June 1993

  Harper 13 June 1993

  Rachel 1
3 June 1993

  Kirby 13 June 1993

  Dan 13 June 1993

  Harper 13 June 1993

  Kirby 13 June 1993

  Kirby and Harper 22 November 1931

  Dan 13 June 1993

  Kirby and Dan 13 June 1993

  Dan 3 December 1929

  Harper and Kirby 13 June 1993

  Harper 13 June 1993

  Kirby 13 June 1993

  Postscript Bartek 3 December 1929

  Acknowledgements

  Easy Touch: A short story by Lauren Beukes

  Designing The Shining Girls Cover: An Interview with Joey Hi-Fi

  Lauren Beukes - At the Forefront of the Global Invasion: An Interview with Lauren Beukes

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Dedication