World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
By Max Brooks
The premise is simple: Max Brooks writes an oral history of a fictional zombie war. The book is set after the war is over, and consists of a series of interview transcripts wherein the subjects answer questions about their experiences during the war.
Brooks allegedly did a metric ton of research for this book to ensure its authenticity, and it really shows. He knows that the subject matter screams "fake," so he goes out of his way to make everything seem as plausible as possible. The outbreak is insane, of course, but the reaction and everything else surrounding it is so well thought-out that it hardly seems to matter. Readers willing to suspend their disbelief a little about the premise will be rewarded with an incredibly thoughtful audit of society that takes its core idea as seriously as can be.
In
Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the film), there are nice little touches about the ripple effects of its fiction. My favorite is probably that comic books in that world are about pirates and cowboys, since there'd be no point in writing much fantasy about superheroes when they exist in reality.
World War Z feels like that. It takes the real world and merely inserts an event, and then tracks the changes this might produce. Some of the betters ones are the observation that closed/totalitarian societies weather the storm better than freer ones, and that black market organ trafficking makes it especially difficult to contain the outbreak.
It's maybe a tad too cynical in its claims about how such a force would eventually be stopped, or just how incompetent and asleep at the wheel our leaders might be, but thankfully we'll never find out on this scale. It never feels like it has much of an agenda beyond a vague contempt for the inability of large organizations, governments, military forces, etc., to adapt to changing circumstances.
Brooks also manages to do something that eludes many fine authors: he makes the disparate characters he interviews sound reasonably distinct. Granted, they're all too eloquent and most come up with some interesting turns of phrase, but this is forgivable in the name of better writing, and one could posit that Brooks would only allow eloquent testimonials into such a book, anyway.
The book makes some bold choices about format, too, beyond the obvious risk of telling an entire story from interview transcripts. What's gutsiest (forgive the pun) is that there are so many of them, very few subjects are revisited, and some only last a few pages. Others go as high as 20 or so, but most fall in the 7-10 range. This is sometimes good (less interesting testimonials don't go on as long, as each section always feels fresh), and sometimes bad (good sections are sometimes far too short, and you never build up much momentum or attachment to individuals). All in all, the format works more often than it doesn't, and it's necessary to give the story the scope and realism it needs.
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It sounds really intriguing, but I'm with you on the idea of taking a break between each. I'm going right from Crime and Punishment into World War Z, which isn't really "light," but figures to go down a bit easier.
