It’s impossible to stop reading this novel once you have started it.
It’s not science fiction though.
I liked Zoo City quite a lot. It was written with passion and sincerity, the writing was punchy and personable, and some of the scenes (the flashbacks to Zinzi’s tragedy, and the brief strand where Zinzi helps to con the American couple in particular) were highly memorable and very well executed. That the book felt a bit rough around the edges in patches was actually part of its appeal – there was a real sense of process going on and that sense of a writer’s still-visible involvement is always something I enjoy in a novel. I felt excited about reading The Shining Girls, firstly because I wanted to see how far Beukes had progressed in her writing since Zoo City, and secondly because I felt certain that its much-advertised premise – a time travelling serial killer – would have to make it a contender for next year’s Clarke Award.
The book is certainly well written – there are parts that are very well written indeed, especially in the first half of the novel, where the groundwork of the plot is still being laid. The descriptions of 1930s Chicago bring the narrative wonderfully alive, exposing the reader to a wide range of smells, sounds and sensations and building up a genuine sense of menace and mystery. The slight hesitancy one found in Zoo City is entirely gone – this is the work of a rapidly maturing, well practised professional writer who seems to hold the whole of her narrative in the palm of her hand. Occasionally the dialogue is a little too pat, a bit too TV-cop-show for my personal taste, but in the main Beukes captures the voices of the various characters remarkably well.
The pages fly by. It feels imperative to find out what happens. As I said at the beginning of this write-up, it would be a strong soul indeed who could open this novel and lay it aside half-read.
But this book has problems, too, which is such a shame. The first of these might not impinge on many readers, indeed will only occur to you if you were expecting The Shining Girls (as I was) to be a science fiction novel. It isn’t. It’s a thriller. Full stop. Yes, there is a killer who travels through time, who manages to evade police capture for sixty years because he can do so. But it turns out that the time travel is just a gimmick. There is no attempt to explore the reasons or possible science behind the phenomenon – which in The Shining Girls might instead be summed up by the simple disclaimer that The House Did It – and indeed the novel might very easily have been written without the time travel element and been just as sucessful within its own remit. Yes, it’s a neat variation on a theme, a clever addition to the serial killer thriller cabinet of macabre curiosities, but it’s no more science fiction than The Time Traveller’s Wife.
It does have more murder in it, though, which leads me on to the second problem I found with the book, which I’m regretfully going to have to call the James Herbert Problem. Beukes’s writing is about a thousand times better than Herbert’s, and her imaginative range is on a whole different planet. But the further I got into the book and as the murders mounted up the more I couldn’t help remembering James Herbert’s The Fog, which I read when I was about fourteen, and which followed the same formula for pretty much the whole of its length: we’re introduced to a character, we learn a little of their backstory, we jog along inside their head for a while, learn the world from their angle – and then they’re murdered. Always brutally, in media res, as the inevitable culmination of that particular section of narrative. Then we skip to the next character, soon-to-be-victim, and so on until the Final Confrontation.
I’m afraid The Shining Girls follows pretty much the same programme of action.
Of course, there is a lot more reason and sense in Beukes’s character vignettes. Each takes place at a different point in time, offering us glimpses of Chicago as a city-kaleidoscope of progress and dissolution, brutality and enlightenment. The ‘shining girls’ of the title are all special and talented women – a research biologist, an architect, a doctor, a dancer, a social worker, a shipbuilder, an artist – all at the beginning of their adult lives and the start of their careers, all latent possibility for women’s advancement across the twentieth century. Many of these character studies – the story of Margot, the junior doctor in the 1970s who works for Jane How, an association offering free abortions to women desperate for help is one I found particularly affecting and powerfully written – are little masterpieces of invention, insight and characterisation. But as the novel progresses, and we realise that none of these engaging characters is destined to survive more than a couple of pages, both the brutality of the action and the inherent tedium of the format inevitably takes its toll. In the end, I began to feel like a voyeur. The murder scenes are violent and explicit. I have no beef with that – murder is violent and explicit, and in exposing the truth behind violence that some writers shrink from Beukes is being true to her subject and exposing the reality of the atrocities the media seem so readily expert at converting into slick Saturday night entertainment. But in the end I was left feeling uncertain whether this novel was weighty enough in other ways to merit such a repetitious and gaudy bloodletting.
In Roberto Bolano’s magnum opus 2666, there is a – let’s see – 300-page section that catalogues a brutal series of murders of women in the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, where such a series of murders actually took place and where the killer/s are still at large. This section of the novel is hard to read, to be sure, but it constitutes one part of the narrative only, there is a lot more to the novel than these brutal murders, and Bolano’s weaving together of diverse narrative strands is a literary achievement of significant accomplishment. The Shining Girls does make a valiant attempt to move beyond the mere depiction of murder and into valid social commentary, but I’m not sure, in the end, if it succeeds in doing so. We are given hints of the killer Harper Curtis’s disturbed mentality – as a child he follows the familiar sociopathic model of practising violence upon animals before moving on to close family members – but his background is just that, a background, lightly sketched and inconsequential in terms of the plot. He kills. That’s all. Why he’s fixated upon the ‘shining girls’ as his victims we never discover.
Kirby, the ‘victim that got away’ is a credible and sympathetic protagonist. I liked her – I liked especially the opening chapter, which depicts her first genuinely chilling encounter with her would-be murderer when Kirby is just seven years old, and I thought her relationship with her mother, Rachel, was particularly well drawn. But as the plot gains momentum, the characterisation suffers. The scenes between Kirby and her ‘first love’ turned total jerk Fred, who wants to make a sex film of Kirby, supposedly as proof of how she’s bounced back from her ordeal (!) are painfully misjudged, and the bit where the cop assigned to one of the murders and the chief of the paper Kirby is working for read her the riot act comes across like one of those boringly predictable scenes in The Killing where (yet again) Sarah Lund gets taken off the case.
The problem with so many page turners is that so much depends on the resolution, and once you know what the resolution is there is little left to make you want to read the book again. Perhaps that’s OK – there is a place, after all, for the well executed story that is simply that, a story, to be enjoyed and discussed with your friends the following day the same way you might enjoy or discuss an exciting but ultimately unchallenging movie. I totally get that, and perhaps my lack of love for easy thrillers is my own loss. The narrative of The Shining Girls is addictive and the writing demonstrates a neat step upwards for Beukes in terms of technique and taken on these terms I would recommend the book. But I can’t help feeling regret – for the paucity of new ideas, for the lazy mishandling of the novel’s science fictional element, for the novel this might so easily have been.
I suppose I hoped that a writer of Beukes’s character and calibre would offer us more.