World War Z (Time to downshift a bit)

The whole zombie obsession lately does seem a bit cliche, barely a day goes by when there isn't something about an undead pubcrawl, or game/quiz on whether you would survive an invasion of the walking dead, and that even became a new AMC series. My interest in the undead goes back pretty far, I watched the original Romero film with my jaw dropped when I was 11 and have been a fan ever since. Without delving too deep into a popular theme that zombies always reflect on society or that most of us go through life with so little awareness of the wider world that we are practically zombies ourselves, I'd like to express a few thoughts on Max Brooks' great novel. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War I would really recommend the audiobook version here though World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War [Abridged 5-CD Set] (AUDIO CD/AUDIO BOOK) it is much better with a full cast, and truer to the idea that this is an oral history. Hope this isn't too much like bandwagon jumping.

Just as an aside, I do like oral history quite a bit but so far in my professional work I haven't tackled trying it because I lack self-confidence and feel I would make a lousy interviewer, but I really enjoy listening to people's stories.  An idea I had was to interview Vietnam Vets to construct a narrative of how many subscribe to the "stab in the back" theme, but I would have a hard time doing it objectively. According to the Wikipedia page (which is fine for just plain research like this) Brooks was inspired by Studs Terkel's oral history of WWII, and it really is an appropriate format because it makes this fantastic story somehow more believable. If I had to make a judgement it would be that it is hard to believe that all the characters interviewed sprang from the same imagination, even if some of them are a bit stereotypical. That is where I fall down in trying to write fiction, while I have encountered soo many diverse people over the years from all over, it's hard to make characters unique and differentiated. So far, there is not a whole lot about the upcoming film version but I would have to assume, being Hollywood, that the first-person memoir will probably not translate. The final product could end up like Starship Troopers, where the novel was all journal entries and the movie was a straight chronology, WWZ would loose much of its charm if this is the case but we can hope right?

I've listened to the full cast audio version I think a half dozen times now over the past few years, it's really an engaging story and now that I know it was abridged I think I'd like to hear the rest. Maybe it could fill in the blanks because many of the interviewees talk about the events as they are common knowledge, the way everybody knows the basic outlines of WWII. But as it is fiction, the reader is left kind of scratching their head because many facts are only alluded to. I had to listen to the Iranian pilot's story several times before realizing that he was describing a nuclear war between Iran and Pakistan. And it was a surprise to read on the Wiki page that Russia in this storyline was now an "expansionist theocracy," no Russians were interviewed so the allusions to decimation of their military and atrocities in Ukraine and Siberia just sounded like reliving the past for those poor people.

Two of the highlights to me were Henry Rollins playing a mercenary hired to defend an entertainment mogul's survivalist compound and Mark Hamill as an infantryman telling battle stories that sounded so familiar to my time in the service. First off, Rollins was the perfect choice as he has such a love/hate relationship with the music and movie business, he always describes himself as a "Hollywood ninja" in his spoken word performances. Rollins is always disgusted by celebrities and the dirty business of entertainment and his contempt really shows in his all-too-brief appearance, such as accentuating the "tired, little whore who's famous for being a tired little whore" lines in describing (the unnamed) paris hilton. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea that some all-important celebrity types would congregate together and broadcast what they're doing during such a crisis, buying a spot in a luxurious fortress to flaunt their privilege and order their guards to shoot people fleeing to it (many of whom were probably fans beforehand) doesn't seem like too much of a reach.

There is nary a trace of Luke Skywalker in Hamill's performance as Todd Wainio, the vet of much of the combat in America against the zombies, and he sells the idea of a guy who actually fought and saw what weapons do to walking corpses to a tee. He reminds me of all the older sergeants I talked to during my tour, describing combat in a cool, casual way, especially all the mistakes made by his superiors that he had to follow. I can really identify with being just one helmet among many, and having to do really dumb stuff just because not doing it would have bad consequences for me, that I don't even know what they'd be. It was just not how you thought in uniform, recognizing how dumb things we did were and grumbling about it were one thing, but actually refusing to do it was completely cut off as an option. Maybe that's why I protest a little too loudly when some swaggering jackass tells me something antithetical to reality as a civilian, maybe that too is why people want to complain about the government and politics so much even though there is little we as individuals can do about it.