Okay. Back to World War Z!
I took the ARC from the nice lady handing them out at CCI only because I had read The Zombie Survival Guide, purchased over a year ago from a leftovers table at Borders. I picked the Guide because everything else on the table was chick lit. I don't like chick lit, but I kinda like zombies. Then I put it on one of the piles at home and forgot about it until Car Drama forced me to troll through the piles in search of something that was not a hardback (too heavy and bulky) that could be easily transported on the bus.
To my great surprise, I loved the ZSG. Everything from it's government-issue line drawings to its paranoid author blurb was perfect. I don't think one needs to have had been forced to spend a lot of time around survivalists to appreciate the deadpan humor of that book, but if you have it was just funnier. And, believe it or not, the work does provide lots of actually useful information if you find yourself on the run when the world as you know it comes to an end. Those of us who live in areas prone to massive geological or civil disruption tend to collect that kind of information.
I was thrilled to find out that the Guide was but the opening shot across the bow. Now that I'm done, I can report it was well worth handing over one of my email addresses to get the ARC. The deal at CCI was you get the ARC if you put down an actual email addy for a mailing list. Normally the answer to that sort of thing is Never Mind, but I just HAD to know what the man was gonna do to flesh out the Guide.
The setup is exactly as stated in the book's title. This is a series of transcribed interviews from various players throughout the world dealing with the zombie apocalypse. I would just like to state my absolute joy at being able to type the words zombie apocalypse.
In all my years of reading zombie stories, no one has EVER thought about the implications as thoroughly as Max Brooks. WWZ is deadly serious world building. He approaches it from a layer beyond what happens from a we are displaced on the food chain. Brooks examines the potential of a zombie apocalypse from perspectives of race and class, and from logistical issues such as what does it *truly* take to make a bottle of root beer? What happens when your privilege runs up against your inability to grow an edible garden? How does religion play into it? What are the true consequences, the individual, personal toll, of designing and enacting an effective final solution? What would a zombie apocalypse do to the world markets? If you're in charge of your nation's armed forces, what's the *actual* psychological impact of effectively handling your soldiers and the populace you are sworn to protect when faced with an unstoppable force, and what practical methods do you come up with to work around that?
Beyond those surface details, there's a whole Current Real World Social Commentary layer one could read into this work that has nothing to do with zombies blindly feeding their way across the land. Yes, that's the nature of the better zombie stories, but I found how Brooks framed zombies as device particularly effective. Along with that, this book, similar to the film "Nightmare Before Christmas" is rather nifty examination of leadership. (I can't remember if I've ever put forth my "Nightmare Before Christmas" is a training manual for mid-career middle managers in this space or the old one, but let's just assume I have. If it turns out I haven't, I'll perhaps do so down the road.)
WWZ a great read, but it's not a zippy read, and while entertaining, it's not fluff. That reality doesn't hit you at first and I think that's because presenting the story through narrative transcripts hides the complexity a little bit. The style of the work is so accessible that you don't immediately realize he's planted big picture stuff in your head that you keep tossing around days later.
At times this book heart rending. My favorite chapter is the one about Paul Redeker, the South African who figured out how to turn the tide. That chapter has several surprises, including a classic twist ending which took my breath away. The first thing that chapter reminded me of was following news reports of the happenings in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission and reading about the Boer scientists who were trying to develop an ultimate weapon that would have used genetics to kill black people. (I don't have time to look up the details now, but you can if you care. My one-line summary of what these scientists were doing is poor.) Those reports scared the living hell of out me. The thing is, Brooks doesn't bring up Redeker and then drop him. He shows how several types who came up with something similar to or tried to enact the Redeker Plan had to deal with the emotional fallout. One narrative is from the pov of a soldier dealing with his commanding officer had a particular punch: the soldier's fury at his officer's action had me mulling the nature of cowardice in crisis and whether or not the soldier was correct in his anger. On one hand, his commander *did* do what needed to be done. On the other hand, he left his men, and by extension his nation, hanging after he did the deed. Was he brave in the end or a coward? Did the soldier, out of selfishness and his own fears, fail to understand the delicate line between duty and cost? Those Redeker chapters are beautiful in a frightful, human way.
My other favorite chapter dealt with the commander of a Chinese uber-submarine who loaded up the sub with as many of his crew's family members as possible, got the hell out and spends a lot of time being hunted while struggling with feelings of betrayal and guilt over his decisions. He has an encounter with two other submarines that I can't figure out how to get into here without massive spoilers. Instead I'll just say one reason that chapter, which I think could stand alone as a short, worked so well for me is because it was a personal story.
All that doesn't mean the book is without flaws.
While WWZ is fantastic at giving you a glimpse at how different people at a variety of levels of responsibility and access respond to a global catastrophe, you're not getting any one person's (or a collection of persons) emotional journey *through* the catastrophe. The beginning/middle/end you get in WWZ is not through any one person's complete subjective experience. At the end of the book he comes back to certain people featured in the beginning, but that's not the same thing. Because of this, while WWZ is a nifty read with moments of glory, to me the book as a whole lacks emotional punch. Many individual chapters rock, but there's a sort of dull echo left at the end. That *could* have something to do with how it ended, though. The final section, "Good-Byes," which is very short, ties up a few dangling plot strings. But in a way you're left with a sense that the story has ended in a And Now I Have No More Words way, but it doesn't feel finished. It's not necessarily that I wanted *more* but I wanted a better sense of Done rather than Just Out Of Words.
Perhaps if the United Nations researcher who is compiler of this book had been more present I'd feel differently. But right at the start Brooks takes him out of the book by having this researcher say "I have attempted to reserve judgment, or commentary of any kind, and if there is a human factor that should be removed, let it be my own." I dunno. If the researcher felt so strongly about what was censored from the postwar commission report (AHAHAHAHAHA! Love it!) to the point where putting together WWZ was the attempt to return the intimacy stripped from the official document, doesn't that tell us that the researcher had a profound, life-changing experience? Why then weren't we allowed to see that, or at least have it hinted at? Though the researcher answers critics by justifying why he decided to put together a personal history book, in fact he did *not* put together a personal history book. He compiled other people's personal history. If the researcher were more "present" throughout the work, even in small ways, perhaps I would have come to the end with a feeling of Done. But that could just be me.
Out of the entire thing, only one chapter, the one relating Sharon's story, was a total dud. It reads as something you would give to an actress as stage directions before the camera rolls.
Perhaps I should mention this now. The transcript approach doesn't entirely work all the time because it cheats. This could just be me, though. Having read a lot of transcripts due to the previous day job, what these things don't have are stage directions. There are a lot of stage directions in this book. "He swivels in his chair, motioning to a picture above his desk" ... "he smiles, holds up his hands in thanks" ... "a thin, satisfied smile crosses his lips," that sort of thing. This might not bother other people, and on the whole you can ignore them. I still found them distracting more often than not, and at times it gave me the feeling that WWZ was in part designed to attract the attention of the Hollywood people.
I think it's obvious that somebody's going to make this into a movie. In fact, you could get 10 movies out of this easy. Some of the chapters read as a treatment, such as the one with the female pilot stranded in the badlands being talked through to safety by a dispatcher over her headset, all of the sections about the encounter at Yonkers, an a couple of the sections set at the Claremont Colleges. Gotta admit that I look forward to the inevitable film, and invite you to join me in bitching about how the Hollywood People totally screwed it up OMG!!!
You could also get more than one book, or perhaps more realistically a series of longish shorts, out of both WWZ and the case studies in the Guide. There's a Lakota zombie killer who shows up in the Guide I'd LOVE to see an entire book about.*** North Korea? Jesus that was mean of him to do what he did there. As penance he should write it out and get it published somewhere I can read it. And of course, I demand more about the researcher who wrote the thing.
Tabletop gamers! This novel will give you 50 scenarios, easily.
Zombie/horror fans! It's not all about gore and braaaaiiiiiiins. This book will show you that.
Not horror fans! It's not a "horror" book. Give it a chance.
Fellow Die Whitey Warriors! Nicely done race stuff in here, some of it keenly subtle.
Cover obsessives! Though it's a little dark, this cover is good. The question about the black splatters is cleared very quickly. I think the cover is bold, creepy, hints at what's to come and most importantly doesn't irritate me. (I have this thing about ugly/inappropriate/stupid book covers. It's a hobby. Sometimes I throw away the covers that come with books because they are such an affront to my Delicate Sensibilities.)
The short version? World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is worth picking up. It comes out sometime this month from Crown/Random House. Check it out.
*** That's a correction. For some reason I thought Elijah Black was in WWZ, but when I went back to fact check for his tribal affiliation I discovered he was only in the Guide. The world Brooks built was so strong in my head that one character migrated into the other work! We here at BGF Central would like to formally request Max Brooks write more about Elijah Black and his grandfather. Due to the hint dropped at the end of his case study in the Guide, a story should be in the works. If it's not then Max Brooks is just a big meanie and we here at BGF Central turn our backs upon him now and forevermore.
