Perhaps it's the concrete manifestation of a southern African belief about straying spirits. Spiritually dead psychopaths and sociopaths need not apply – or so we are told, though at least three totally evil psychos later turn up animalised. Perhaps it's a redemptive punishment for the redeemable criminal. Perhaps it was triggered by a nuclear accident. The 'animalled' phenomenon, we learn, dates back to the 1980s, a plague with a trajectory strikingly similar to the Aids epidemic. Why a sloth? Could that be a reference to Zinzi's besetting sin, the moral laziness that is eating her hollow, as she sinks ever deeper into nasty petty crime, in a failed recovery from drug addiction and prison? Or could it be that Beukes just likes sloths? Maybe she read the same webpage as I did, where wiccan pundit Patti Wigington opines that 'No one will ever tell you their totem animal is the wombat, the hedgehog or the three-toed sloth.'

Strength, size and courage don't necessarily work in the mean streets of Beukes's urban South Africa. There is a bear, but he, or she, only turns up to get killed, in the novel's most atmospheric and spooky set-piece. Zinzi December's animal is a sloth, boyfriend Benoît harbours a mongoose other denizens of Zoo City (the run down area of Johannesburg which has become a ghetto for the 'animalled') have attracted scorpions, sunbirds, vervet monkeys. Not so in Lauren Beukes's much-feted Zoo City, which has just won the Arthur C Clarke award.

Something big, famous and charismatic, anyway. However, human nature being what it is, shamanic/pagan/wiccan types inhabiting globalised urban society tend to feel they've been chosen by an eagle, a wolf or a bear. I n pagan/wiccan/shamanic circles the world over, it is agreed that you don't choose your power animal, or familiar.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes