To anyone who has not heard of or read it, I highly recommend Max Brooks’ World War Z. It’s speculative fiction, with Brooks chronicling an imaginary Zombie Apocalypse, and how humanity would respond. Even if you aren’t a fan of “zombie fiction,” which is generally used to tell horror stories, this book is utterly fascinating. Calling WWZ a horror novel because there are zombies would be like calling The Dark Tower a horror series because it’s written by Stephen King. An interesting angle is taken to the writing: it’s an “oral history,” containing interviews with people who took part in this global catastrophe. Ten years after the end of the twenty-year battle with the plague, Brooks’ interviewer character sits down with the people that lived through it.
The Battle of Yonkers, our last stand in New York to restore American morale
The presentation of the narrative in WWZ is provocative because of how it withholds the details from the reader, allowing you to sort of see things in your own personal context. Shrouding the truth of the conflict in mystery gives it more weight, like the TV show Lost, which regardless of its problems is provocative and addictive. Brooks deftly handles the presentation to give you an oblique glance at the events, rather than the whole picture, so your mind fills in the gaps. It gives a greater sense of awe when hearing a third- or fourth-hand account of what happened. There are occasions in the book where an interviewee mentions a totally horrific event offhand, without detailed description, as it’s common knowledge to anyone surviving the zombie war. I love the realistic tones the characters use. In realily, if someone recalling events of the Second World War mentioned the horrors of their “boxcar ride to the camps of Poland,” anyone would pick up the reference to the Holocaust. In the alternate world of WWZ, this war was real and it was global. Everyone was part of it. The narrative style kept me engaged where a novelistic approach to storytelling would’ve been pretty generic. It’s a new take on an old genre.
A number of cliche zombie/disaster storytelling techniques are subverted in interesting ways. The plague originates in China, actually beneath the waters of the reservoir created by the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, and one of the primary vectors for its spread is the black market for human organs. The idea is that China, being a source of illicit human organ trafficking, discreetly spreads the hidden plague around the world, without realizing the consequences until it’s too late. I also really enjoyed the notion that zombies can survive infinitely underwater, making isolation on small islands kind of useless.
It seems, though, that one of Brooks’ primary goals in writing WWZ was to use a fake catastrophe to analyze how cultures and societies would react in today’s climate. The Americans, being complacent and distrustful of their government, are caught off guard and are completely ignorant of the “survivalist” tactics that become necessary. Another story tells of an American pharmaceutical company that uses news of the plague to market a fake “African Rabies” (the colloquial name for the plague, as it’s initially assumed to have come from South Africa) drug for profit. Russia becomes a theocracy, Cuba becomes the center of the economic world, and (my favorite) North Korea becomes devoid of human life, supposedly having evacuated the entire population underground.
The only gripe with the book is sort of systemic to its style. The narrative relies on accounts from so many diverse perspectives, we only ever get 10 or 12 pages with a person before jumping to a completely unrelated person on the other side of the world. Brooks does a decent job revealing an event, technique, or historic individual in one story only to flesh that subject out further with the subsequent interview, but overall the narrative being broken up into discrete, short parts makes it harder to read for long stretches.
If you’re an audiobook fan, the audio version of WWZ is a pretty amazing production. The interviews are voice-acted by a number of famous names, including Carl Reiner, Alan Alda, and John Turturro. The deal-breaker with the audio version, though, is that it’s abridged. I have no idea why this was done, other than budget, but each individual account is made richer by hearing the others, so I’d recommend the text version.
It’s sort of unfortunate to think that a lot of potential readers will be turned off by the title of this book. The draw of this book is everything but the zombies.
