World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

"I’m going to say something stupid, because, yes, of course, it was a best-seller that was turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. So it’s hardly unknown. But when I started reading it I thought: why did nobody tell me how good this book is? Fundamentally, I think so many people think: ‘zombies are not for me.’ I’m one of them. But this book totally transcends that category. The premise of the novel is that an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission is compiling first person accounts—ten years after the event—of what was effectively another pandemic , a zombie pandemic that turned into a worldwide zombie war. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination. In all the other books I’ve recommended, you get a first-person narrator, or a defined cast of characters. The world-building in those books is already extremely impressive. But what’s so exceptional about World War Z is that it’s so incredibly diverse. The agent moves around the world, from China to Israel , speaking to characters of different countries from different social positions. Its geopolitics feels very accurate, and he imagines them with such complexity and density. It’s staggeringly well done. As I was saying before, dialogue is really hard to do. And this has perhaps sixty different voices. It’s polyphonic. Max Brooks is able to inhabit all these different characters. It’s an astounding piece of work. I feel quite evangelical about it. In many ways, it doesn’t feel like a novel. It doesn’t really have a beginning, middle and end. You could read it over years if you wanted to. Entirely. The film is a kind of companion piece, a standalone drama with one or two stories from within the sprawling, richly imagined universe of the book. As a writer, I tip my hat to him. It’s mind boggling."

"Cole: In World War Z , you have this idea of resiliency and not submitting to something incomprehensible; humanity trying to figure out how to do something really hard together. Telling this story from so many points of view reinforces Brooks’ desire to say that this modern society we experience is really fragile. It’s really about something more than a zombie takeover, it’s about questions of what it means to live together in a prosperous and stable world. “He offers a fresh look at the zombie genre by knitting it into our real world.” Singer: He offered a fresh look at this zombie genre by knitting it into our real world. His characters react as we think they would. He uses the multiple perspectives format, which is challenging to write but as a reader I really enjoy it as you get to experience the war [through the eyes of] multiple characters. Because it’s so realistic, it fits into the category of a ‘useful’ read; I love the way he plays with how bureaucracies are resistant to change and bad information. This is significant not just when dealing with zombie outbreaks but, for example, in how the US military and government handled the early years of the Iraq war. Also, the audiobook is just great. An amazing listen."

"Culture. World War Z is told from multiple different perspectives and multiple different cultures. It’s about how they respond to the impending apocalypse: what the Americans do and what happens in the Middle East, how individuals respond. So you have a couple of people who are already preparing for the end of the world and you’ve got the military view. It’s great because Max Brooks really pulls together this multi-cultural viewpoint, it’s not just a Brad Pitt action-movie vehicle. In some ways this goes back to the Manichean ‘light and dark’ conversation. It’s interesting that the allusion to World War Two intermixes with zombies. There’s a celebration in American culture of World War II because there was a clear bad guy. Just like in the zombie movies, where there are the people who are trying to eat you and there’s not much of a grey area. It’s ok if you shoot a zombie in the head. It’s not like a stomach shot. It’s the most viscerally unsettling way of killing them, their identity, their personhood, their face — you have to kill it."

"Initially, your readers should be aware that it is extremely different from the blockbuster film with Brad Pitt. The underlying concept is the same, and the film retains some of the globetrotting elements, but otherwise the two are very different. In my opinion, the book is far superior. One of the reasons I chose World War Z is that it is a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature. It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical. It is clearly critical of many of the post-9/11 choices made by the United States and Britain. The novel is an oral history of the zombie war, and it really does range the globe. There is no single narrative line running through the book. Rather, you have to piece the oral histories together like a collage to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened to the world. That is the genius of using this low culture trope: we know what happens in a zombie apocalypse. We don’t have to be told every seminal event in that narrative. We talk to people who are largely on the periphery of the story. There is a lovely effect like those achieved by modernists like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf in which you have a chapter from one character’s point of view, and then another chapter from another character’s point of view. You are putting together thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. The narrator – or compiler – of World War Z is a cultural historian who works for the United Nations. He is trying to talk to people and gather their stories in the same way that an oral historian might put together a history of the Blitz, or a history of the war in the South Pacific. I think one of the things that Brooks is trying to do is to explore what a true world war would look like. Even during the First World War, there were whole swathes of the world that were not involved. In Brooks’s novel, the war starts in China but there are islands in the middle of the pacific which had to deal with zombies coming up out of the sea. Then there’s Cuba which became a world power as a result of decisions that they made during the course of the conflict. There are two episodes that are set in Japan. The Japanese islands were largely evacuated during the zombie apocalypse, except for two people who stay behind. One of these is a sort of Hong Kong action-figure character: he’s a blind gardener who becomes a zombie killer with his spade. Along with his apprentice, he takes on the task of cleansing the Japanese isles so that the garden will be restored. There’s a kind of universality about the situation. Everybody on the planet has to deal with the threat. I think that Brooks is suggesting that we are so much more alike than we are different. Yes. And if we think of it as an anti-American post-9/11 narrative, one of the things that it does is say that there is a value to globalism and cooperation and pulling together, as opposed to the response we took to our own perceived apocalypse."