World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Warby Max Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
World War Z / 9780307346612
This book is a collection of 'interviews' and vignettes in the wake of the world wide zombie war. I'd had some concerns going in that the book wouldn't sustain suspense very well, since all the stories are told retroactively (so you know the teller survived their tale), but I shouldn't have been worried. "World War Z" brings suspense to the table, along with an incredible freshness of tone and ideas.
The new ideas are where this book really shines. Brooks doesn't just reach for the low-hanging zombie fruit; he looks at the zombie apocalypse from a variety of lenses. Some of the new ideas explored here include: The spreading of the virus via the organ transplant black market. Neighborhood cleanup in the wake of the war and what that would entail. Feral children and animals and the rise of both after a global apocalypse. The dangers of the "Lone Rangers", particularly ones who set bombs willy-nilly. A look at both successful and unsuccessful military initiatives. Life aboard a submarine as an escape from the walking dead. Tracking zombie movements along coastlines via tagging. And those are all things off the top of my head -- there's a huge wealth of ideas in this book that I haven't even touched on.
There's so many things to like about this book, but I love Brooks' treatment of minorities. This isn't your average zombie apocalypse where only the meaty manly men survive. We get to see a female fighter pilot trek to a pick-up point when her cargo explodes and she has to eject from the plane. We see a man in a wheelchair and hear him talk about his time on the neighborhood patrol. We talk to a blind man who lived in the wilds of Japan on his own, listening carefully for the zombies and killing any who came within his range. It's so rare to see such a wide range of people in a zombie novel, and Brooks delivers in a way that a more focused novel simply couldn't. I also love that the novel explores the apocalypse from a very solid class perspective -- the rich who treat the whole thing as a bizarre reality show fare (on the whole) much worse than the average folks on the street.
I read "World War Z" for a book club, but it's one of the few books that I finished only to want to pick it up and read it again. I recommend the book highly, though I will note one pet peeve: Brooks' interviews are written in the vernacular and I did get very tired seeing the word "crazy" thrown around when really what was meant was "silly", "foolish", "ill-advised", or some other, better word. Still, if you can get past that, I think you'll like this novel if you have any affinity for zombie literature.
~ Ana Mardoll
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7 comments:
I too thought this book was absolutely brilliant, but I had two other criticisms:
1) I think it's more accurate to say that the book is written in attempted vernacular - I have to interview people a lot in my job and I felt like Brooks quite often phrased sentences supposedly coming from relaxed regular folks, and/or from relatively undereducated people, in ways that would only sound natural in an academic treatise. Much of the time it was fine, but sometimes it did jar me out of the character. But then, many authors would have trouble clearly defining a single narrator voice in a first-person novel, and he's done dozens here, so perhaps it's understandable. (I don't know by what process he actually wrote the novel, so maybe he did what I'm about to recommend, but I imagine that if he had read each interview out loud, as though it was an actual interview, he might have caught these things more easily.)
2) The international perspective was an excellent approach, with some hiccups. The chapters about Japan are from the perspective of a social recluse (nevertheless capable of some remarkable feats of strength and agility) and a blind martial monk - they're fun chapters and I loved the monk's philosophising, but they seemed way out of character in terms of the usual brutal pragmatism of the book, and that in turn made it feel like "And here's how things are in this weird exotic place". That was not always the case, of course - the sequence aboard the Chinese submarine was very much distilled WWZ - but when he only had a handful of non-western interviews, it seemed weird to invest so much time into Ninja Zombie-Slayers. (I felt like we didn't get a lot out of Africa, either, aside from the Redeker sequence.)
You know, those are really good points. Wish I'd thought of them!
I *did* notice that we didn't get nearly enough African perspectives, at least not after the Redeker stuff which was pretty intense. I thought he was trying to compensate for that, but in retrospect it does seem lop-sided.
I didn't know how I felt about Japanese Hacker Guy. I mean, on the one hand, I can think there are probably some non-neuro-typical people who would react in the way he did (not taking it seriously until it was almost too late) but on the other hand... stereotypes. :( I think I brain wiped that one as soon as I finished it.
The Russian birthing program was creepy as all get-out. /Random
The audiobook is quite good too. Lots of great voices. Alan Alda is the most distinctive, and Mark Hamill gets a couple segments. It is abridged.
when he only had a handful of non-western interviews, it seemed weird to invest so much time into Ninja Zombie-Slayers. (I felt like we didn't get a lot out of Africa, either, aside from the Redeker sequence.)
I absolutely totally second these points. (We don't get black African voices, really, and that's a pretty substantial omission...It's supposedly originally financed by the UN, right?) It would be cool if there were expanded editions and/or anthologies where Brooks or other people added more perspectives. The world he set up totally allows for that. WWZ isn't actually as mighty a tome as the one that inspired it, right (Is it The Good War?)? Which is a good decision in terms of readability, but leaves the door wide open for a fuller telling of the story.
It would be cool if there were expanded editions and/or anthologies where Brooks or other people added more perspectives. The world he set up totally allows for that. WWZ isn't actually as mighty a tome as the one that inspired it, right (Is it The Good War?)? Which is a good decision in terms of readability, but leaves the door wide open for a fuller telling of the story.
A Brooks-edited collection of stories would be a brilliant follow-up - more ideas, an easier time differentiating the voices of interviewees, and more global coverage. Given how vast the world is, I can't blame Brooks for not creating a detailed story for every single country out there, and I think it's good that we get an incomplete picture in some ways (one thing that WWZ did very well was avoid a flood of As You Know), but it's also vast enough to fit in a lot more standalone stories without cluttering up the map.
My first experience with WWZ was the audiobook, and I agree; it was absolutely fantastic.
In general to the story: I know there's unrealistic-y stuff or at least fiction-y stuff about it but it still read, to me, like such a -real- version of a zombie apocalypse that it really struck a chord. Amazing book.
The lack of African voices in WWZ seemed... poingantly apt to me, and a more tragic voice for its silence. The Reddecker plan, as described, is entirely brutal and effective, and given sub-Saharan Africa's already tenuous economic and health systems, would condemn most of the continent. Perhaps the silence indicates that no one can speak for the dead because there's nobody left. Which, it occurs to me now, is a heartbreakingly realistic way of describing so many sub-Saharan African crises. (Of course, there could be a practical aspect to that, too -- given the economic disruption that the entire world suffered, and given sub-Saharan Africa's generally fragile state of transport right now, after a decade of neglect the interior may be entirely unreachable. If I recall "The World Without Us" correctly, a paved road becomes impassible in about 5 years without care; a gravel one in about 3, and a graded dirt track about 18 months. Which destroys not only land transport, but air, since air strips are either paved or graded.)
I must second the audiobook -- while abridged, the performances are brilliant. The abridger did well, too -- zie cut whole chapters rather than trying to cut pieces from the stories. Personally, I'm thankful for that -- some of the more personally intense pieces didn't make it into the audio, and merely reading them is almost too much. (I often skip the Sniffer-K section near the end when reading because it hits too hard.) There are parts of the audio as is that always make me cry as is; some of the skipped sections would be just too much. For me, reading gives me some physical distance that audio doesn't.
I third a "More Stories from... " That would be an amazing anthology.
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