It goes by many names: “The Crisis”, “The Dark Years”, “The Walking Plague”, as well as newer and more “hip” titles such as “World War Z” or “Z War One”. I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable “Z War Two”. For me, it will always be “The Zombie War”, and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard-pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction. Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories or emotions, and it is these memories, and emotions, that are the subject of this book.
World War Z was a book club read for me, and having seen the silly action movie based on it years ago, I didn’t expect this to be much more than a mild diversion. But it is more than that, nothing like the movie, and I was surprised by how much I liked this. The concept: Published ten years after the official end of The Zombie War that nearly wiped out humanity, UN agent Max Brooks — who has travelled the globe, assembling eyewitness reports to the crisis — was given the greenlight to preserve those stories that illustrate “the human factor” of the war that the UN had purged from his official reports. Compiled as a series of interviews, as though directly transcribed from Brooks’ translation/recording device, what I liked the most was the truly global perspective: Each country responded to the zombie threat in its own culturally unique way and exploring these differences seems to be the main focus of the book. On the plus side, it is obvious that Brooks did a lot of research into military-tactical/medical/sociocultural information (the whole reads as plausible), but in the minus column, there’s a sameness to the voices of the people he interviews; even the women sound like men (but perhaps that’s who survives a zombie war, and we are only meeting the survivors). Brooks has written that his inspiration was to reimagine the journalism of Studs Terkel ("The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two) by way of George Romero’s Return of the Living Dead films, and to the extent that he has used this conceit for thought-provoking social commentary, I’d call World War Z a conceptual success and an entertaining read.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
Who could imagine a worldwide health crisis hitting the news cycle and the American government downplaying its danger because it’s an election year? Would the rest of the world take the situation more seriously if Israel retreated from Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories to a completely defensible position, even granting Palestinians a one time right of return before clamping down the Iron Dome? As I opened with, it was these various global responses that I found most fascinating: When the first zombies arise in China, the government denies their existence and disappears all witnesses; South Africa enacts an apartheid-era plan for saving “the valuable minority” against swarming masses; the French take unnecessary risks against the zombie hordes in order to redeem their WWII legacy as cowards; I particularly enjoyed the irony of boatloads of Americans trying to escape to the relative safety of Cuba. From a nuclear sub hiding at the bottom of the ocean to astronauts on the ISS; from Russia to Japan to northern Canada, Brooks imagines a uniquely appropriate response for each situation. There may not be a tense and dramatic story arc to this novel — we open with the knowledge that the zombie threat has been mostly contained and that we’ll only hear survivor stories — but each story is a nugget of drama that tells us something about humanity.
I remember reading years ago that World War Z was written as a metaphor for the battle that Brooks’ mother (actress Anne Bancroft) waged against cancer, and knowing that beforehand, I was often mentally swapping out “cancer” for “zombie” as I read:
For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That’s the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That’s the kind of war we had to fight.
And as 2020 comes to a close, I couldn’t help but mentally swap out “COVID-19” for “zombies” as I read, and that also had satisfying parallels:
The numbers are declining, thank heavens, but it doesn’t mean people should let down their guard. We’re still at war, and until every trace is sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth, everybody’s still gotta pitch in and do their job. Be nice if that was the lesson people took from all this misery. We’re all in this together, so pitch in and do your job.
This was a good book club pick for right now and I am delighted that I got more out of World War Z than I had expected to.
Added on December 24: We rewatched the movie last night, and while it wasn't quite as "silly" as I remembered it, Dave and I agreed that it was pretty forgettable (all I could really remember from years ago was Brad Pitt in a helicopter, "fast zombies" piling up against the wall surrounding Jerusalem, and people tiptoeing through a lab). I will say that the movie is much more dramatic than the book - it happens in the opening days of the zombie war, after all, when people don't even know what they're fighting against - but the movie loses all semblance of social commentary, which was the point of the book. Two totally different experiences, and I much preferred the book.
