Z is for Zombies

Whilst reading World War Z, I frequently found myself forgetting that zombies aren't real, or at least, not yet. I felt as though I was reading something legitimate, like peering into a document from the future or some kind of alternate universe's past. And something about this quality of “real-ness” in World War Z made it difficult for me to read for long periods of time. I remember reaching the halfway point after several hours of reading and wanting to slip under the covers with hot cocoa, luxuriating in modern comforts, as though it were me that had had a rampaging zombie break through my picture window (so much for cardio).

This is what I find so interesting about Max Brooks’ book. It reads so believably, that it exhausts us in the way that reading a government document about plagues and epidemics might, although albeit World War Z is a heck of a lot more entertaining. It's a book that appeals to anyone who has wondered about what a zombie apocalypse would “look like” on a global scale. It’s a whollop of a zombie novel, in part because it is so ambitious in scope and so viscerally realistic.

As I was reading, I thought about why it was I found World War Z so believable. What made it feel real? How did Brooks craft his book to make you into a believer? I have a few theories.

Structure

I figure we’ll start with the obvious. World War Z isn’t written like a conventional novel. The book seems to be drawing inspiration from the Dracula-esque epistolary novel, but is (obviously) significantly updated in terms of form. After all, ain’t nobody got time to write letters to their fiancé in a zombie apocalypse. Zombies don't exactly bide their time. The difference here is that World War Z is an oral history, structured on the page as interview transcripts and short memoirs, with a believable foundation upon which the zombie legend can stand: that the book is the rejected pet project of a government official, and the first recorded history of the Zombie War.

This structure, which veers sharply from a traditional story arc, or a traditional protagonist, distances you from the work, in a sense. The structure (a series of interviews) makes it more difficult to immerse yourself in characters, and instead forces you to immerse yourself in the overall premise - the thread which weaves together and helps you to make sense of the various vignettes.

Allusions

Some of the interviewees in Brooks’ book seem to be allusions to real-life people. The one which struck me as most obvious was the “Whacko,” or former Vice President, who featured in the interviews that took place in our very own Burlington, Vermont. The “Whacko,” bears a pretty striking resemblance to our former governor, now the stuff of modern legend for his unseemly downfall during the run-up to the 2000 elections, Howard Dean. In World War Z he describes himself thusly, "I'd been a rising star, at least until I 'self-destructed.' That's what they said about me, right? All the cowards and the hypocrites who'd rather die than see a real man express his passion" (146-47). Later on the same page he is described as a "screaming radical." Similarly, the president, often referred to as “the Big Guy,” by the Vice President * cough * Howard Dean * cough * seems an awful lot like Colin Powell, who also happens to ties to Jamaica. (151).

Brooks also name drops constantly, which sets us firmly in our own world, with plenty of pop culture references thrown in, just in case the grounding in present day and myriad of historical references weren’t enough. In one interview with a former fighter pilot in Tennessee, the X-Wing fighter (a la Star Wars) is brought up. In subsequent chapters there is mention of Megatron from the Transformers series, "Hello Kitty," the television show The View and Gilligan's Island. All of these small details, as well as allusions to people, places and things we might or might not be familiar with (such as the Vice President from Burlington), build a world in which zombies become distinctly and eerily more plausible than we might otherwise have imagined by creating characters in which we recognize bits and pieces of not only ourselves, but of our society and culture as well.

Voice

While reading World War Z, I was particularly impressed by Brooks’ ability to imagine and execute so many different narrative voices. From the inventor of Phalanx, Breck Scott, who's disturbing, and yet unsurprisingly cavalier tone showcases the story of those who stood to profit from the disaster (there's always someone, isn't there?) to the feral child, Shannon, who though in her early twenties, speaks like a five-year-old and mimics the moaning and groaning of a zombie, to the no-nonsense style of the various soldiers and military professionals who feature in the book, this sense of a diversity of "voices," creates an illusion of authenticity and reality - as though the story's plausibility is strengthened by the sense of it being a shared one, a collective.

Parallels to Real-Life Pandemics

Here I’m thinking in particular about the multitude of personal and government accounts reflecting on the Spanish Influenza of 1918, although many of the recent pandemic scares (SARS, Avian influenza, H1N1, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, etc.) seem to parallel certain interviews in Brooks’ novel in terms of similarity in tone (sterile government pamphlets and the sensationalist media stories alike).

Here's some background info, in case your recollection of pandemic flu history is a little spotty: the Spanish Influenza killed more people than the first World War. Apparently, to this day no one is quite sure how many people died, but an expert who spent his life studying the flu (MacFarlane Burnett) has estimated that the worldwide death toll from the pandemic was at least 50 million and more generous estimates speculate as many as 100 million. To put those numbers into perspective, that's at least 1/5th of the global population at the time. We never get a precise estimate of the death toll in World War Z, although according to a Zombie Wiki, "in North America alone there were stated to be 200 million zombies. It is also stated that half of China's population was infected, adding about another 600 million zombies" (Zombiepedia). Regardless, let's just say Spanish Influenza was pretty impressive for a relatively commonplace, real-life little 'ol virus.

There were also similarities in the way in which society, the media and people in positions of authority (the government, the police) handled the news of the flu. In World War Z, Breck Scott develops a phony vaccine for the zombie virus. In 1918, syrups and other tonics abounded that claimed to prevent or cure symptoms of the flu. In World War Z, Brooks describes the unreliability of the news media, particularly in the first half of the book. In 1918, there was a similar attitude, "many times public health officials knew the truth but did not tell it. This was the case in Philadelphia," and "Newspapers were unbelievably bad sources," writes a panel member of a recent Dept. of Health and Human Services workshop on the pandemic. Also similar were the strategies for containing the damage. Eventually during the Spanish Influenza outbreaks, it become clear that "social distancing," that is, quarantining and isolating those infected, was the best method for diminishing the virus' spread. This might seem obvious to us today, but previous to the 1918, the West hadn't seen a pandemic like the Spanish flu since the Bubonic plague.

If you're interested, there are a handful of interviews with Spanish influenza survivors on YouTube, many of which have elements that remind me of the accounts of survivors in World War Z, as well as a documentary called "We Heard the Bells," which originally aired on PBS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbEefT_M6xY.

Sources:

United States. Department of Health and Human Services.Pandemic Flu History. Web. .

"World War Z." Zombiepedia. N.p.. Web. 21 Mar 2013. .