May Your Humble Blogger be excused from the game of pretending that World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a non-fiction book? I mean, yes, I like that deadpan stuff as much as the next guy, but we’ve got it by now, yes? Max Brooks pretending it’s all real: funny. Random reviewer pretending it’s all real: less funny. That’s before the diminishing returns.
Anyway, this is a really good book. Like all good zombie movies (and zombie books, I suppose), it’s not really about zombies, while being enough about zombies to work. There is plenty there to scare you about our actual future, and also plenty to entertain you about the details of World War Zombie. Some of it is provocative in the serious way, and plenty of it is provocative in the “Hmmm, is Mr. Brooks advocating a new kind of NRA progressivism?” way. Much fun.
My main complaint is that in executing the Studs Turkel-style novel, he includes, essentially, one interview from each major event, creating a series of short stories that combine to make a real novel. He does return to a few characters over time, which is nice, but what he misses is the opportunity to include several characters’ views of one event. There is a major battle, for instance, that shows the first time real military might is thrown at the zombie horde, and the ways in which is fails. The battle is told from the point of view of a foot soldier, which is very effective. But the incident is important enough (within the world of the novel) to be told more than once, from more than one point of view. I know he had an ambitious plan and a lot to cover, but it would have been worth trimming some of the incidents out to give more space to a deeper, more cubist, potentially far more disturbing picture of the, say, three main events of the North American struggle and also the nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. Just saying.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.