World War Z

[sawyl]

Casting around for something to bridge a gap in my reading schedule — my latest order of dead trees having been delayed at the post office — I happened on Max Brooks' World War Z. Set 12 years after the zombie war, the novel uses the conceit of a series of interviews with survivors to present a historical account of the hostilities.

The accounts run in roughly chronological order, starting with the initial recognition of the plague — or, the case of officialdom, denial of the problem — running through the pandemic, the decision to reclaim the world from the zombie menace, to accounts of the post WWZ world. The interviewees range from for vice presidents to soldiers on the ground to a woman who grew up feral in the ruins of the Midwest, as well as encompassing a number of different nationalities, avoiding the US-centric tendencies of some post-apocalyptic novels.

The general tone of the novel is satirical and Brooks uses many of the character to poke fun at the worst excesses of modern life. He skewers humanity's general fear of fear through a snake-oil salesman who sells people a rabies vaccine, implying but without ever, quite, claiming, its efficaciousness against the zombie plague. He plays with the idea of reality TV by including an account of a mercenary who was hired to provide security for an oligarch's fortress, a place packed full of the super rich and super famous and livecast on the web to all the poor peons struggling to survive the rising tide of zombies. He has fun with the idea of military superiority, including a dramatic description of the Battle of Yonkers in which the full fury of the US's hyper-technological military is deployed against the shambling, insensate menace of the living dead only to fall dramatically short. Best of all, in Brooks' new, post-apocalyptic world, Cuba has been turned into an economic and scientific superpower thanks to a combination of its geographic position and the reintegration of the many of the people whose families had originally emigrated to the US.

Although there were some things that didn't quite work for me — I wasn't entirely convinced by the tone of the British and American accounts — there's a lot to like about World War Z, with its sharp view of the world and it's vast cast of characters. Although the zombie plague itself isn't as rigourously worked out as it is in, say, Mira Grant's Newsflesh series, the simple approach — zombies are dead, slow moving and can make other zombies with a bite — acts as an excellent contrast agent, allowing Brooks to laugh and mock our absurdly wasteful consumer age.