World War Z | Max Brooks (2006)
Wow. Just... wow. While I have to confess that this book gave me nightmares (I've been sneakily reading it at work just to avoid reading it too close to bedtime!), it was an amazingly well wrought story and a fascinating look at so many, many elements of society, culture, international relations, humanity....
My Review
It has now been several years since the "official" end of the zombie wars, and survivors are beginning to share their memories and tell there stories. Compiled here are many of these accounts and personal anecdotes from people who were engaged in the conflict in a variety of ways -- as members of the armed forces sent to defend other surviving humans, as members of one of the many pseudo-military groups that has sprung up, or as civilian humans just struggling to survive. Together, their voices weave a rich depiction of the plague years, when zombies threatened to destroy humanity and the political geography of the world was indelibly altered.
Constructed like Studs Terkel's Interviews with America, and crafted as a compilation of interviews with zombie-war survivors, the format of this narrative is certainly a bit different from what one would usually expect from a novel. It reads more like a work of non-fiction -- of impartial, fact-based reporting based on personal stories. The unnamed interviewer allows those (s)he is interviewing to share their stories with little interruption aside from a few questions. The "transcripts" of these fictional interviews is purportedly presented in their original form. [NOTE: One of the weaknesses of the text is that all of the speakers are just a bit too grammatically correct when they speak. Real transcripts are never quite so tidy.]
The interviewees speak, for the most part, like real-life interviewees: they tell only parts of the story, the leave out or mix up crucial details, and they are overcome by emotion and choose only to allude to specifics without actually risking repeating them aloud. Some the the accounts stand well on their own; others seem to base their comprehensibility on the stories told by others.
For his research alone, Max Brooks deserves amazing credit for crafting such a compelling story. This is satire at its best -- fictional and speculative to be sure, but steeped in enough fact and actual history to be not only compelling but accurate. While a certain American-ness seems to pervade the voices of most of the interviewees, for the most part each speaker presents largely as a product of his/her region, culture, government, and political structure. Brooks reveals an amazing wealth of knowledge of world languages, military history, geography, and politics, upon the foundation of which he creates a largely plausible rendition of what would happen were the world suddenly to be overrun by a nearly uncontrollable and ever-growing population of zombies.
From this premise, Brooks offers amazing insight into today's socio-political geography and the many cultural, political, and religious tensions that control the shape of our world. Read closely, the narrative becomes a striking satire of the many mistakes we are making and/or would make, were the dead really to rise or were the world to suddenly be confronted by a similarly unexpected and indefatigable challenge. It's worth getting past the nightmare-inducing images of the zombie attacks to be able to delve into Brook's socio-political commentary and satire.
Goodreads link
Brooks, Max. World War Z. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2006.