World War Z
Back with the Something Strange book club, and today it’s an oral history of a prolonged war against a zombie outbreak.
Brooks frames this as a series of interviews that couldn’t be put in official reports, but that he felt like needed telling. It’s an interesting choice because it gives the book a level of realism that you don’t often see, albeit at the cost of almost everything else you might think you want from a novel.
There’s no plot arc, no structure, no stakes to speak of. There are dozens of characters, mostly unrelated to each other. Just people telling their stories. You already know the war is over, there are zero suprises around the corner. It’s even more extreme than Dracula in its approach to ‘found footage’ storytelling, and doesn’t toy with an unreliable narrator like Sleeping Giants1 does.
At the time I’m sure the appeal of the book was as a thought experiment, a way to imagine how various countries might fare in a time of crisis. Now of course, how can you not read this without thinking of the COVID pandemic? A virus starts in China, people are aware of it but are also in denial it’s happening, it takes ages to fight it and changes the world forever. The reality of the pandemic was more sad and less overtly gory, but the similarities to what happened in 2020 are uncanny. Even down to the virus being given a racist name to begin with.
The big inspiration for the book was The Good War: An Oral History of World War II by Studs Terkel, and I think Brooks’ clever turn was comparing disease outbreak to the outbreak of war and realising that the effects on society aren’t all that different.
What really resonates is the post-pandemic tiredness and sadness. Yes people have adapted, yes we will be OK, but there’s still that feeling that we all lost something in those years we won’t get back. Brooks imbues this into all his characters.
What didn’t happen was a re-arranging of the world order. In the pandemic ‘key workers’ became essential and valued by society, but frankly we did fuck all to show it and now we are back to giving CEOs large bonuses for doing zoom calls.
As a zombie novel this isn’t particularly scary, but as a Nostradamus-like prediction of what was to come in real life, it’s fascinating.