Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and he honed his craft working as a writer on Saturday Night Live, which is as good a place as any to start as a writer. His second book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (to give it it’s proper title), was first published in 2006, and tells the story of a global war against zombies by using a series of oral interviews conducted by a narrator, who is part of the United Nations Postwar Commission. It is the follow-up to Brooks’ 2003 novel, The Zombie Survival Guide.
Firstly, an admission: I’m not one for fantasy novels. I drew the line after Dracula and Frankenstein, and I’m happy to say I’ve never been near Twilight. And I’m also not a big fan of disaster novels either (I’m not going to say post-apocalyptic as technically you don’t get post- an apocalypse).
I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it was so harrowing I promised myself, as the father of a young son, I’d never read it again. I’ve also never read a comic book. But I’ve fallen for the TV series, The Walking Dead, so when my wife read World War Z, she told me I might enjoy it and should give it a go.
I think in some ways we’re all drawn to the idea of a global disaster that would test us individually and as a species. There’s perhaps something messianic in us that makes us feel that we could be the chosen ones, the survivors, and these stories help us live it out. World War Z can work as a companion piece to Walking Dead, a sort of what-happened-before, if you like, but it also stands alone.
World War Z’s story of a zombie pandemic, begins with tales of “patient zero” and outbreaks of the misunderstood “African Rabies”, through to the effect the plague has on individuals, nations and the planet as a whole, told through the words of survivors, be they politicians, soldiers, astronauts, or regular people. We trace the outbreak, the denial, the cover-ups, the quarantines, the deaths, the migrations, the wars that are a by-product of the pandemic and finally the “defeat” of the zombies and the subsequent new world order that is the result of the global upheaval. Brooks has taken on a huge task and has used an interesting narrative ploy (the multiple interviewees) to tell his story. On the whole I think he is successful.
The idea of a species threatening global pandemic is nothing new, and neither are zombies. So Brooks’ approach, to focus on the tales of the survivors, is an original take. It enables him to cover a whole trope of ideas and wax lyrically on such matters as government ineptitude, corporate corruption, and human short-sightedness, while always keeping the living dead lurking in the background (and often the foreground); a lurching virus that exists to kill and can only be stopped by being, literally, lobotomized.
Brooks manages to make mass-migration to the South Pacific, an oil field beneath Windsor Castle, a war between Iran and Pakistan and the rise of a Russian Christian Empire – amongst other plot points – sound as realistic as he does the initial reactions to the plague and the way that resourceful humans finally deal with it and its repercussions. He has a good ear for dialogue and internal monologue as well as the technological, cultural, economical and political issues that the story throws up.
There has been criticism of the novel as some feel the different narrative strands (some last for many pages, others are little more than a paragraph) make it difficult to develop momentum. But I feel that they’ve missed the point, as there seems to be an unwritten agreement between author and reader that we understand what he is trying to achieve and that we need to go with him and fill in the blanks ourselves, to notice and imagine what is going on at the edges of his snippets of stories, that we can understand what has happened, or will happen, without it being spelt out to us.
I did enjoy this book, it was good entertainment and escapism, and from a creative-writing point of view it shows some good technique; as mentioned above, Brooks employs showing-not-telling to great effect, with his second-hand narration we’re never really shown directly the linear story, instead we dip in and out from various points of view, receive good and bad reports and the opinions of reliable and unreliable narrators. I liked this technique and thought that on the whole, it worked.
World War Z is not a literary masterpiece, but an interesting read that should appeal to fans of the genre and general readers alike.