The Gravest Generation

We stopped watching Walking Dead a few seasons into the series not because it wasn't good — at least for me — but rather because it was so fatiguing: week after week of watching characters under a constant threat of zombie annihilation without the slightest glimmer of hope just wears you down after a while. Max Brooks' World War Z overcomes this by telling the story of the great world war against zombiedom in a series of post-war debrief interviews. I think — and maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's entirely just me — that you have to write a zombie story like this. There's no living alongside of zombies in some kind of brokered detente — no one will rest easy until they're eradicated, and stories like that are going to be unsettling.

Instead of a narrative Z is structured as series of oral history transcripts — first person accounts. To Brooks' credit, he is super ambitious about the number of interviews and different voices he includes — people from every continent and both sexes. Writing these characters in the first person is totally audacious, bordering on arrogant. Which is to say, a criticism that the voices tend to sound the same is slightly misplaced — you try making all these people sound individual! Also, I think it's stylistically plausible that the veterans of the great zombie war to save civilization speak a similar language . . . to an extent.

At some point — OK, why not now? — it will have to be talked about (preferably in the passive voice) why we're in such a zombie moment. Z was published in 2006 (the original Walking Dead comic debuted in 2003, and the show in 2010). Part of the fantasy of Z is how at peace the world is following the great zombie war — nothing unifies humanity like an inhuman existential threat. And there's a great glow in like a clear and convincing win against it. And for a while there after 2001 there was that sort of cartoonish existential threat that a lot of people, maybe even some sci-fi and comic enthusiasts, maybe responded to in a visceral sort of way — you know, it's easy to feel good about mowing down Zeke (World War Z slang for zombie) like it maybe/might feel good to dispatch some zombie-like terries ("Draxx them sklounst" all around!). At any rate, it makes sense to me.

(A parenthetical about the film version of the book, or what was ostensibly the film version: as audacious as it was for Books to try to write a gazillion different characters in the first person it was equally so to think you could make this book a film: a faithful adaption would cost a billion dollars. So I don't expect lavish on-location scenes, or whatnot. And even though the film happens contemporaneously — as opposed to the oral history of the book — I suppose it works in that respect. I don't even mind that all of humanity is saved by one gorgeous Brad Pitt of a character [though that hair is not great] in a way that diverges 1000 percent from the book. No, what really makes my blood run black is that the zombies in the film travel faster than the speed of light. Kind of like those super speedy True Blood vampires, but with face eating. It's dumb because the one organizing principle of zombies is that they're slow as shit. And I don't believe that humanity can win a war against fast zombies. It's ridiculous. Absurd even. That said, the thing made half a billion dollars, so what do I know?)

Posted: March 27th, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: , ,