Book Review: World War Z, Max Brooks

(contains plot spoilers)

Having watched the film of World War Z ages ago and found it OK but not brilliant, I thought it was finally time to get round to reading the book by Max Brooks it was (loosely) based on. I was hooked from the start!

I’ll start by saying that the book is nothing like the film, in fact the only location from the film I remembered when reading it was behind the quarantine wall in Israel. Everything else in the film seems to have been ‘inspired’ by the book rather than based on it.

Secondly, you need good eyesight though because the font used is tiny in comparison to most fiction. I can easily see it being literally uncomfortable reading for some!

World War Z is not written in a novel style. Brooks has written it as a set of independent first person interviews from all over the world and in all kinds of situations including military, civilian and research. The premise is that the author wrote an official report, years after the zombie war and found all of the personal accounts removed from the final edition. So that these stories were not lost to history, he wrote a book containing them. They are presented without any chronology and they follow no route around the world. That may sound too random to make any sense to the reader but it works incredibly well and the scenarios are so varied and imaginative that when you start a new interview you are immediately drawn into a new take on the zombie war and its effect on the world and its population. All kinds of viewpoints are studied even including a canine unit detecting and flushing out urban zombies. There is one particular interview with an astronaut from the space station who marvelled at all the fires burning around the world, which immediately made me think of the premise of my own blog.

There are underlying themes throughout some of the interviews of the fragility and greed of the society we take for granted. The denial and laziness of some people contrasts with the brazen profiteering of others. The media focuses on cliché and sound-bite without delving into the early rumours of the outbreaks across the world, The reliance on technology both for warfare and survival and the difficulties of fighting an enemy that has no care for living or dying.  World War Z is, in that respect, a commentary on our lifestyle and attitudes as much as it is a post-apocalyptic vision of our downfall against such a far-fetched enemy as a zombie horde.  Whilst it is easy to mock the basis for the war, the enemy could be anything that would bring about our downfall and choosing it to be zombies taps into a ripe archive of preconceptions to both confirm and banish.

There are some great characters presented in the interviews including some you love to hate as they explain ‘I can’t believe they did that and can laugh about it’ experiences. Some of the interviews you just don’t want to end and there is plenty of humour and sadness to balance the narrative.   There is also hope in the final stages as the world adjusts after its survival before developing the tools and tactics it needs to take on the zombie horde and begin re-taking the world from an almost insurmountable opposition.

I loved World War Z, read it in only a couple of sittings and could easily read it again now.