Bookshot #3: World War Z

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks

Is it just me, or are zombies everywhere you look these days? There are zombie walks, zombie movies (such as the truly brilliant 'Zombieland' or 'Shaun of the Dead'), there are silly games on Facebook which involve killing Zombies. Speaking of Facebook, I was invited to participate in 'Zombie Awareness Month' which I guess is this month- so, in the spirit of that, and, coincidentally, completely by accident, I picked up 'World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War' while the Missus and I were house sitting for my parents and read it without stopping over the course of about two and a half days.

A simple concept, mainly a series of interviews with the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, aiming to tell the story of what really happened during the terrible plague years when the undead ravaged the Earth, World War Z draws a frighteningly realistic world quickly, sucks you into it and keeps you hooked through every single page. From frantic governments isolating themselves and whomever they could save where they could, to the people who took to the sea to save themselves, there's a gritty, almost journalistic realism that leaps out of the page at you. That, I think, is what makes this book so damn readable, as well as so damn spooky- it feels real. It feels like what would actually happen, should the undead really start to rise and sweep across the world. Eventually, humanity decides they're going to go on the offensive- but the world that Brooks' narrator describes is a shattered, far different world from what it had been before. The United States is no longer the economic engine of the world- that honor falls to newly democratic Cuba. Russia has fallen back to a quasi-fundamentalist Tsarist regime and China has gone through Civil War and out the other side. Civilization is slowly making a comeback and Brooks' narrator weaves a deceptively simple path across the globe, conducting 'interviews' with the survivors, hoping to preserve their stories for future generations to come.

Brilliant concept when you think about it: telling a completely fictional story through a series of interviews. It seems like something that's doomed to fall flat on its face- but doesn't- and I think that's because Brooks really does set this up as an actual oral history. Oral histories in real life are nothing more than a series of interviews with the people who were there, saw it all and remember everything and so it is with World War Z. Where the real genius of the concept comes to light is how Brooks managed to create such a detailed, vivid post-apocalyptic world without reliance on massive amounts of prose. When you're dealing with 'genre' fiction, world creation is probably the most important part of the entire writing process. After all, if people don't buy the post-apocalyptic world or even the fairy kingdom you've created for your characters to play in, why would they buy into your story?

There are good examples of this- and then there are lazy examples of this- some of Harry Turtledove's later works seem nothing more than retreads of recent history with the names flipped around. ('In The Presence of Mine Enemies' is a particularly egregious example of this.) Rare is it that you find a genre writer that's content with the perfect gem, like this one. Some of them go on for so long they die before finishing their story (Robert Jordan and 'The Wheel of Time') and some of them just spend the rest of their careers producing pale replicas of what they first wrote. (David Eddings, I'm looking at you.) But Brooks has apparently kept his eyes firmly on the horizon and it works brilliantly for him: he doesn't try and get crazy ambitious, he doesn't reach to high or too far- he just tells the story of a world where the undead come to life and wreck up the place. And the devastating war the followed to push them back.

Zombies... people seem to be talking about them more and more these days- probably due to the profusion of pale, emo looking vampires everywhere you look. Zombies are the perfect cultural response to annoyance of 'Twilight.' After all, what's Edward going to do when a horde of zombies catch up with him? They have no blood to suck...

Overall: I went right through this book. It's a brilliant post-apocalyptic vision of a world almost destroyed by the ravaging undead and the fact that Brooks manages to create a creepily believable world and pull of this concept of an oral history quite nicely, only serves to underline what an excellent read this book really is.