Book Review: City Zoo
City Zoo by Jeff Pedigo
"Everything you think you know has been Monkeyed with".
Summary: A readable and entertaining retelling of the catastrophe that was 2016 to 2020 which will challenge what you think you understand about any of it.
Synopsis After a hard won fight, the animals of City Zoo have their independence. They run the zoo now and the (human) mayor of the city that surrounds them washes his hands of the whole affair.
Then proceed several years of history regarding what happens to the zoo and its occupants. They begin with a grand dream of how life could be and resolve to do their best to make it that way. However, in relatively short order politics rears its ugly head and, even worse, media professionals.
The animals all have their roles to play and play them they do, sometimes to comedic, and sometimes to tragic effect. As things progress, you'd be forgiven for thinking it all starts to sound a bit familiar. Too familiar. Terribly, awfully familiar. Until, eventually, you realize what garden path you are being lead down and where it will all end up.
Review: One has to be careful of the comparisons one draws when pitting themselves alongside, or even against, the classics. Jeff Pedigo squares off against Orwell's Animal Farm right from the back cover with City Zoo.
The novel at first appears to be a light-hearted fictional story about how the animals choose to conduct themselves after their successful revolution with, one assumes, many delightful and humorous comparisons to humans and their amusing habits along the way. After all, that's how most of these sorts of novels go. Look at the silly animals and see how so like us they are. Monkeys with sniper rifles notwithstanding.
And, at first, everything seems to be going reasonably well. The animals come up with a constitution, raise a flag, sing an anthem, and develop the symbols of their new autonomy. History carries on a bit, elections are held, every animal has a vote and new Animal Zookeepers are elected through whom the zoo's daily operations are maintained. So far so good. The monkeys set up a means of reporting the weekly news at the zoo so all the animals are informed about the zoo's activities. All the pieces are in place for what feels like might turn out to be the usual talking-animals sort of fairy tale.
And then one of the Animal Zookeepers is assassinated by a mysterious assassin. And so begins a descent into the chaos of a roman à clef about the political events of the years 2016 to 2020 and perhaps beyond.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is another roman à clef. The events of that novel are directly and clearly related to the events of the Russian Revolution and it's aftermath. Orwell was a socialist and deeply upset at the Russians not for being Communist, but for doing socialism wrong. And what was worse, in Orwell's view, was that the British Public, particularly the middle classes and above, all seemed to be okay with it. No one was really allowed to criticize the Russians, particularly because they were allies during World War II. It just didn't seem proper to the press, the publishers, and the general public of the time to go around criticizing these people who had helped the Allies win the war. So they made it very difficult for Orwell, and really for anyone else, to speak out about what was going on in Russia. At the time, if you understood the relatively recent history of Russia, Animal Farm was a "book with a key", and that key was the Russian Revolution.
Similarly, City Zoo is a book with a key. Its particular key is the political cycle of events leading up to the US elections of 2016 and the years following. It's not difficult to unlock the story and see what Pedigo is talking about, provided you are reasonably familiar with the actual events in the first place. Even without a strong working familiarity, a reasonably astute observer should recognize the standard usage of elephant versus donkey, why you would choose ot cast the press and media as monkeys of various sorts, why one of the elephant's opponents in the election is cast as a rhino, and so forth. The point of a roman à clef is not to hide its subject matter.
Rather, the point is to take the reader one step away from the actual events so they can, hopefully, assess the events with greater clarity of mind and with less personal prejudice and preconceived notions getting in the way of more clear-headed thinking. You use the device to make it possible for people to see a problem they might not otherwise see if they remain zoomed close in to the original events.
Pedigo doesn't make anything up here — there is very little fiction here. These are the events of those years in that election cycle. He's not lying to you when he tells the story. Just as Orwell was not lying to his audience when he told the story of animals taking over a farm, the pigs taking over the animals and, in the end, becoming just like the original people running the place. It was all true of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, just like City Zoo is all true about the election and presidency it is examining.
But, like Orwell, Pedigo has a particular point of view about those events. One which he wants to get across in the telling of the story. While Orwell thought that Socialism was a pretty neat thing, but that the Russians had screwed it up and were harming their people because of it, Pedigo is in a different place and time. Pedigo believes it was the media that let the people of America down. And that on their shoulders lays the blame for all that followed.
Importantly, he does identify the critical moment at which it became nearly inevitable that what did happen was going to happen. The first sin of the media, according to Pedigo, was not taking the elephant seriously when it announced it was running. Rather than treating it as a serious candidate, the monkeys decry the elephant as a silly, non-serious contender who couldn't possibly challenge the established candidates. The one's everyone knew were going to be the real candidates for Animal Zookeeper. And, as they mock the elephant and his candidacy and treat it as a joke, the ever observing public takes more and more notice of the discrepancies between what the monkeys say is going on and what the animals can see with there own eyes is going on. And the animals start to wonder if maybe not everything is as they are told it is. From there it is all downhill.
City Zoo's warning isn't about the ills of socialism incorrectly applied, it's a warning about the media we are fed, consume, and believe, and the manner in which it is served to us.
Pedigo does an excellent job creating the world of City Zoo and casts his animals appropriately. The story zips along like the best light fiction does. You're carried from moment to moment and event to event with alacrity. If it seems unbelievable that these things would happen to animals, imagine how much more unbelievable it will all be to a future reader years removed from the original source when they realize that everything in the book actually happened to real people in a real world. And that they let it happen to them.
Regardless of your point of view, City Zoo should be an interesting read, if for no other reason that to have the opportunity to really think about what went on, what is still going on, and how it has all been allowed to happen. For that alone it should be on your reading list.