World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

A brilliant - BRILLIANT, MWAH! MWAH! - gimmick marred by imperfect execution. This was (mostly) huge fun to listen to, with a sparkly all-star cast and ambitious world-building and clever plotting.

The gimmick is this: modeled closely on Studs Terkel's The Good War, this is a Near Future oral history of a world that has just emerged, panting and traumatized, from a global zombie apocalypse. We meet soldiers from the Ukraine, moms from the US, uber-capitalists and priests and doctors and policymakers and generals and lots and lots of more soldiers. We meet, in one brilliant moment, an Australian astronaut who was on the ISS when the zombies took over and watched it all happen via high-resolution satellite monitoring. We see countries rise and fall; the post-zombie world has Cuba as its economic powerhouse, Russia as an Orthodox Christian theocracy, and Iceland as a shitshow of semi-frozen undead. The scope is vast, ambitious, and - again, SO SMART. Such a great idea! Max Brooks! Great idea.

But! And this is a big, marring butt: there are two big aspects that kinda kill the joy. First, all the voices sound the same: they sound like Max Brooks. i.e. Over-written, over-wordy, white American guy-isms, military fanboy guy-isms. It's sort of absurd to hear ostensible South Africans, Russians, Indian, Israelis, and Germans speak in such obviously American ways. And while Brooks tries hard - very hard - to incorporate the socio-political realism of each country (the German soldier who recounts his prejudice against his east German commanding officer was spot-on; like, LITERALLY a German person IRL had explained to me the EXACT SAME cultural dynamic of West vs. East the day before I read that part) - anyway, while Brooks tries hard, he also frequently stumbles. Some countries feel vivid and real, but many also feel like Americanized stereotypes of themselves; and this is unfortunate, since it kills the suspension of disbelief in those sections.

Second big killjoy is how completely military fanboy/”who cares about ladies” Brooks's writing is. Honestly, I could have done with about 50 pages less of weapon laundry lists, in exchange for just ONE lady character who wasn't: a mom, an emotionally stunted girl-woman “with the body of a supermodel”, or a butch soldier. Seriously, those are your options? Mom, model, military? Sigh. Especially since there were a bunch of obvious places where, duh hello, you could have gender-swapped. But I guess Brooks's imagination - as vast and globalized and near futurey as it is - doesn't go that far.

Anyway, I didn't even get to the ZOMBIES. I love zombie apocalypses. If you love them, then you will love this. Even if you DON'T love them, you may love this. This takes the zombie apocalypse and disaster movie, and follows it to many of its logical/political conclusions. By the end of the “war”, you feel exhausted yourself: the world is so changed. Of course it would be! From the first inkling of a “human rabies”, to the worldwide “Great Panic”, to the various countries' various methods to try to contain the problem, to the desolation and eventual reclamation. There are some incredible set pieces - little micro-stories that would have been, on their own, amazing. (In a way, this was the most meta-realistic part, since I've always felt that with oral histories: we're getting small glimpses of amazing lives.)

Some of my favorites: the Chinese nuclear submarine crew who decides to go AWOL as a last-ditch ark of humanity; the Ukrainian soldier trying to help fleeing refugees across the Paton Bridge in Kiev, while moaning zombie hordes approach; the blind “hibakusha” man fleeing to a national park and fighting off zombies there; the helicopter pilot watching epic traffic jams, people locking themselves in their cars, freaking out, as zombies claw at the windows; the young, angry Palestinian kid whose family decides to try to enter Israel's self-quarantined fortress-state.

It's funny, because - while I did enjoy the movie's epic set-pieces (and Israel's fortress-state scene does appear in both the book and the movie), the movie also failed to capture some scenes that were so obviously cinematic: zombie hordes walking the bottom of the ocean, scratching at a submarine's hull? HELLO, THAT'S AWESOME. Zombie hordes approaching up winding Himalayan roads, as the Indian Army debates whether to nuke them? While World War Z the movie was a very satisfying disaster movie, it could have been a VERY EPIC disaster movie.

I do think that much of my enjoyment also came from the excellent audio production, and hearing all my long-lost fave actors. As I said, Brooks's writing suffers from being completely mono-voice, yet there's enough actorly talent here to make these characters their own: Martin Scorsese (!) as the unrepentant capitalist who sold a snake oil “zombie vaccine”; Alan Alda (!) as a privileged technocrat tasked with a New Deal-style national rebuilding project; Rob Reiner (!) as “the Whacko”, the odd and fascinating Vice President (who seems to have been modeled on a funhouse version of Joe Biden, even though this book predates Obama's election!?); David Ogden Stiers as the Ukrainian soldier (what an accent!); Alfred Molina as the Aussie astronaut (also what an accent!); oh yes, and Mark Hamill as a crazed “gnarly, dude!” Vietnam-vet-style veteran of the failed “Battle of Yonkers”. There's many more (F. Murray Abraham! Rene Auberjonois! Kal Penn! Common!), but those stuck out as particularly good readings.

Oh yeah, and the ONE THING that I was surprised Brooks didn't capitalize on - since its one of the most brilliant of zombie movie tropes - is the scene of subverting a zombie's Otherness. That is, usually, the zombies approach as mindless, horrifying hordes. But then there's a scene (such as this brilliant one in Shaun of the Dead), where one of your loved ones gets bitten. THE URGENT TRAGEDY OF IT! I thought an oral history would have a-plenty of such tales of family members turning on each other. But there was none of it: the zombie hordes remained an alien monolith. Oh well, missed opportunity.

Overall: listen to the audiobook, the cast makes up for the so-so characterizations. Plot is amazing.