World War Z

I deliberately chose a cover without
Brad Pitt on it.

World War Z is subtitled 'An oral history of the zombie wars', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. In a series of semi-overlapping narratives, it describes the rise of the zombie plague, a pathogen originating in China and spread by ambulatory corpses and infected refugees (and via the illegal trade in rapidly harvested organs) through the first hand accounts of more than forty characters interviewed by a UN investigator after the end of the Zombie War.

The book uses its multiple viewpoints to explore the war from as many angles as possible: civilians, survivalists, military personnel of several nations and politicians of varying persuasions. Its focus is American - justified both by the nationality of the investigator and the narratives of other post-war nations, in particular the 'Holy Russian Empire', an expansionist theocratic state - but its scope is global, with the account of the commander of the ISS throughout the crisis one of the most powerful.

By its nature, World War Z is prime material for an audiobook adaptation, and it has had several. The one attached to my kindle edition is pretty damned good, although I am now greatly tempted by the super-plus all-star version with this cast.

I'm incredulous that in adapting this book for the screen anyone didn't think that the best idea was just to cherry pick a couple of these stories and film it as a mockumentary, spliced with 'archive footage' from the zombie wars. How did they not do that? Instead we got a crappy action movie which tried to jam poor Brad Pitt back into the action hunk mould that kept him from achieving his true potential as a talented character actor for so long.

World War Z is a satirical novel, using the zombie war as a lens to examine the nature of human reaction to disaster, both singly and corporately. It takes an unusually even-handed approach, with American isolationism and capitalism taking as many knocks as Soviet collectivism, and paints a vivid picture of a world at and after a war for which it was utterly unprepared. It tells tales of heroism and folly, of great heart and towering cynicism. Governmental incompetence, corporate malfeasance and models of morale are all covered, from the brutal tactics of the Russian leadership to largely uninfected Cuba's switch from faltering Communist casualty to the great boom economy of the war.

It's not a perfect book, and certainly there were a couple of points in the English section where I felt that Brooks had gone awry a little, but it's a satire more than a political assessment and some inaccuracy can be allowed. I can't speak for the effectiveness of the Russian and Chinese sections in particular, but it certainly lacks the triumphal pro-Americanism of, say, the movie. In particular the segregation of 'Unified Palestine' by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities is plagued by violent resistance from both Jewish and Muslim extremists, but isn't overrun with the living dead as soon as an American points out that they're fucked.