A Review of World War Z (see also: a love letter to a man named Max Brooks)

In October of 2010 I first read Max Brooks’ 'World War Z'.

    The husband had brought it home because someone had told him it was interesting, or he thought it was interesting. I can't remember. He was still going through his, 'I must read all the walking dead graphic novels that exist' phase, so I assume somewhere someone out there told him it was a good idea.

    Honestly, I thought it was going to be a stupid horror book with a stupid plot and all the characters would die and that would be that.

    I was not ready for what I was about to read.

    My first read through of WWZ was fast. I inhaled the story like none other. I've only ever been effected in such a way by two other books, 'The Portrait of Dorian Grey' and Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'

    I do not. I'll repeat that. I DO NOT have problems putting a book down and going to sleep. I love to read, but I also love to sleep. Rarely does the former win out.

    I read WWZ in a matter of six hours. I started it at about 10 PM and finished it at 4 AM. I did not try to go back to sleep. I immediately started it over. That second read through was finished during the next day.

    I took a few days off reading and then I read it for a third time. This time, slower, with more purpose.

    That week my apartment caught on fire and I had to work on being without a home for two weeks. I'm sure if that hadn't happened I would have continued to read it forever.

    The fourth time I read it, it was at the same time the next year on a road trip with a friend of mine. I got in the car and immediately announced to her I would reading a horror novel out loud to her in the car while we drove across the state. She did not object as much as I thought she would.

The fifth time I read it was just about a year and a half ago. I needed something to purge my brain after I read an awful book (see also: terrible or horrendous) and WWZ did the trick.

    This time I'm reading it very slowly. And by very slowly, I mean, I started it yesterday and am already more than half way done with it. But! There's a specific purpose for this sixth read through.

    I'm going to right a review. (See also: love letter to a man named Max Brooks.)

    My review has three objectives.

1. To inform everyone that I love World War Z as much as possible.
2. To get my dad on board with me thinking this is the greatest book of all time. (Yes, that's actually why I'm doing this.)
3. To complain about Brad Pitt as loudly as possible.

 

 

My review is going to be split up into 8 parts, each released at a different time so that I don't one giant mega review. No one likes a giant mega review.

   

    Let me be clear: If you have seen the movie, but have no read the book, don't even try to justify the movie to me. I left the theater feeling betrayed and heartbroken. I knew I would, but there was a glimmer of child like hope still clinging to dear life inside of me. Brad Pitt murdered that hope and I hate him for it.

So. We begin.

Part One: Warnings

“It was all too intimate,” The chairperson said during one of our many “animated” discussions. “Too many opinions. Too many feelings. That's not what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”

- From the Introduction

 

 

The entire book is told in sections of different people who survived the zombie way in different ways. The first man the reader gets to meet is Kwan Jingshu, a medical doctor in China.

 

    He introduced me to a small village called 'New Dachang'.

    This first section holds so much foreboding that you miss the first read through, its difficult to swallow once you understand the over arching message of the entire book.

 

    Kwan Jingshu's story is not one of my favorites. I give it a 3/5- but that's only because there are so many stories in the book that outweigh it, not because it falters in its story telling or substance.

    Kwan Jingshu was given the task of being the opening story to a monumental novel.

   

    Some authors have a distinct voice. Max Brooks does not have a distinct voice. It's as if he breathes in his characters and actually becomes them before writing their small tales. I honestly believed every word Kwan Jingshu was saying because it was written so well.

 

    We're introduced to a small village named 'New Dachang.' Named such because 'Old Dachang' had to be moved to make way for a dam.

    Kwan Jingshu reminds me of one of those old men who still does the right thing, no matter the cost but he's still kind of bitter for it. Like, why can't the rest of the world get on board with it?

 

    I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at heart. “Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people.”

 

    When he reaches New Dachang, he's not sure what he's supposed to be looking for, but the reception is interesting.

 

    “The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some of them kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them you understand, not as individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and most dynamic super power, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space. It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as “The Chinese Century” and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages.

    I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine my first patient.”

Kwan is unsure of what he's looking at. Nothing seems to add up and he's a well seasoned doctor who has seen his fair share of crazy.

   

    “I tried to take a blood sample and instead only extracted brown, viscous matter.”

When Kwan finally reaches "patient zero" a small child who had gone diving for ancestral treasures in the submerged Old Dachang, he's more than had enough of the heebie jeebies for one night.

 

    “I am embarrassed to admit this; I have been a doctor for most of my adult life. I was trained and you can even say 'raised' by The People's Liberation Army. I've treated more than my share of combat injuries, faced down my own death on more than one occasion, and now I was scared, truly scared, of this frail child.”

 

After examining patient zero, Kwan calls an old war friend of his to see if anything else has been going on that's weird. Old war friend is not very helpful.

    “He asked me, 'Are you armed?' 'Why would I be?' I asked.”

 

As the whole thing is wrapping up Kwan knows that nothing good is going to come of this. To confirm his theory, the villagers seem to think the same thing.

    “'This is your punishment!' She shouted, 'This is revenge for Fengdu!'”

 

    Fengdu, like Dachang, was mostly underwater. There's a whole lot of superstitions surrounding 'the city of ghosts' and really quite worth the research if you want to look into it. (I spent a good hour just reading things about it.)

    If the zombie apocalypse really did start there, I could understand why it began near such an interesting location.

   

 

    Kwan Jingshu's story ends rather abruptly when the military arrives and everyone is sort of spirited away and we start on another story.

 

    Moving from New Dachang, we find ourselves in Tibet.

 

    We get to meet Nury Televadi, a shetou, (see also: smuggler)

   

    I'll also give Nury a 3/5 for the same reason I gave Kwan a 3/5, it's because the most brilliant work is yet to come.

    People are now spending a lot of money to get people out of China. China is spending a lot of money to make it look like the dead aren't trying to eat people.

    The early days of World War Z are pretty good for smugglers, especially ones that really don't have a moral conscience. Nury might have one, but I bet it's pretty small.

   

    At this point in the story, no one really admits that their loved ones are becoming infected with something, coming back from the dead and trying to eat people.

   

    “The outbreak changed all that. Suddenly we were besieged with offers, and not just from the liudong renkou, but also, as you say, from people on the up and up. I had urban professionals, private farmers, even low level government officials. These were people who had a lot to lose. They didn't care where they were going, they just knew they needed to get out.”

 

    In the beginning they mostly transported just infected people. Not full blown zombies.

 

    “If you showed any signs of advanced infection they wouldn't go near you... the golden rule was, you couldn't fool foreign immigration officials until you fooled your shetou first.”

 

    After awhile, they were in fact, just carrying zombies around wherever they went.

 

    “Their family usually had them bound and gagged. You'd see something moving in the back of a car, squirming softly under clothing or heavy blankets. You'd hear banging from a car's boot, or, later, from crates with airholes in the backs of vans.”

 

    A lot of the smugglers were getting wise to what was happening and didn't have the same affection for the dead that the family members trying to sneak them out did.

 

    “Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast- it didn't matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast, and unloaded the infected renshe onto the beach. I've heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early case of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you'd hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walking out of the surf.”

 

    Finally, Nury explains why he stopped being a smuggler. Because the money stopped being worth it.

 

    “The man's Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of everyday. The driver's eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn't going to be good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck.”

    “Where was the truck headed?”

    “Kyrgyzstan.”

 

    This is the human element our narrator talks about in the introduction. On one side, you have people unable to let go of their family members after they've clearly turned into flesh eating monsters, and on the other side you have the people who are willing to exploit that for their own personal gain.

    I was raised in the Han Solo generation. We all think smugglers are cool. They're the bad guys who aren't really bad. They play by their own rules and they saunter everywhere. There's loads of sauntering.

    But here's the real deal Sparky, smugglers are not cool. They're smugglers. They just want to get paid and then they saunter away. It's human greed at its very core. They don't care about what their actions could potentially be doing to the rest of the world, they just want to know if the money is good enough or not.

    And so, the disease spreads.

 

    This next story about a man named Stanley McDonald, who first encountered the living dead when he was in The Third Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry doing drug interdiction operations in Kyrgyzstan.

    Now, Kyrgyzstan also borders China on one side, so I can't very well blame the truck load of ghouls for starting the infection there, but it sure didn't help.

 

    I like Stanley. He now lives in Greece and seems pretty well adjusted for what he went through. He brings a new human element to the story that was lacking in the first two. He gives the human element of every day man.

    So, Kwan Jingshu brought the element of honor and responsibility.

    Nury Televadi brought the human element of every man for himself. Just getting out and getting paid.

    Stanley McDonald brings the actual humanity.

 

    “Traders and thugs and locally hired muscle. That's all we expected. That's all we were ready for.”

 

    This was the story that actually made me feel afraid.

 

    “The blood trail led up the mountain path from the massacre in the wadi. A lot of blood. Anyone who lost that much wouldn't be getting up again. Only somehow he did. He hadn't been treated. There were no other track marks. From where we could tell, this man had run, bled, fallen face down- we could still see his blood face-mark imprinted in the sand. Somehow, without suffocating, without bleeding to death, he'd lain there for some time, then just gotten up again and started walking. These new tracks were very different from the old. They were slower, closer together. His right foot was dragging, clearly why he'd lost his shoe, an old, worn-out, Nike hightop. The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not human, but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized. We followed these and the drag marks to the entrance of the cave.”

 

 

There's been quite the fire fight in the cave and they follow it all the way back to the infirmary where they find a headless doctor and the other Nike hightop.

 

"You could see by the blood trails, the foot prints, and the shell casings that the entire battle had originated from the infirmary."

 

"The last tunnel we checked had been collapsed from the use of booby-trapped demolition charge. A hand was sticking out the limestone. It was still moving. I reacted from gut, leaned forward and grabbed the hand. Felt that grip, like steal, almost crushed my fingers. I pulled back, tried to get away. It wouldn't let me go. I pulled harder, dug my feet in."

 

Stanley is a good soldier. He's also a good man. He was terrified in the cave and he sees a hand moving in rubble. His first reaction is grab that hand. Why? When so much carnage had happened, when that hand could belong to anyone why was his reaction to reach out and grab it?

Because its the nature of our humanity. To reach out, offer solace, or reassurance.

 

Later Stanley's government convinced him what he saw in the cave wasn't real. That it didn't happen.

 

"They didn't break me, I broke myself."

 

 

Moving to Brazil we meet a drug addicted white man named Fernando Oliveira. Before the war he was a doctor who performed illegal organ transplants

 

His organs, he explains, usually came from China.

"Herr Muller needed a new heart and my beach house needed a new herbal Jacuzzi."

 

See what I'm talking about the shady morality of some people in this book? We're revisiting the world of greed.

 

"Herr Muller never came out of anesthesia."

 

Herr Muller isn't too hot post heart surgery but the other doctor assures him everything is fine and he should go out.

A few hours go by and suddenly Fernando gets a call from one of his nurses who is flipping completely out. Fernando rushes back to the hospital to figure out what's going on.

 

"I noticed blood seeping out from under the door. I entered and found it covering the floor. Silva was lying  in the far corner, Muller crouching over him, with his fat, pale, hairy back to me. I can't remember how I got his attention. Whether I called his name, uttered a swear, or did anything at all but just stand there. Muller turned to me, bits of bloody meat falling from his open mouth. I saw that his steal sutures had been partially pried open and a thick, black, gelatinous fluid oozed through the incision. He got shakily to his feet, lumbering slowly toward me."

 

Fernando successfully saves his life and the life of his two nurses. Herr Muller loses his head and the authorities, who had been covering up Fernando's illegal operations for some time, take Silva's body somewhere else.

Maybe he got buried. Maybe they set him on fire. Maybe they just left his body somewhere out there, on a side street.

Either which way, Fernando didn't care.

 

"I wanted to forget what happened, not investigate it further. By the time I realized the danger, it was scratching at my front door."

 

Like the smuggler before him, Fernando only wants to forget about what's happening around him, not realize that he was contributing to the end of civilization by buttoning up and ignoring it.

 

Next we get to move on over to Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town is a big deal in this book. Seriously. Cape Town gets mentioned all the time.

I don't know if this speaker has a name. If he does, I've missed it every time. All I know is that I love him and his story makes me cry.

 

Our main character describes when the ghouls first became a big deal while he was walking home to his mother and his two sisters.

First there's some running, some shouting, then gunfire and then pure chaos.

"The older ones, they just start running. They had a different kind of survival instinct, an instinct born in a time when they were slaves in their own country. In those days everyone knew who "they" were and if "they" were coming all you could do was run and pray."

 

The main character is of course talking about Apartheid when the Afrikaners minority ruled. That was what everyone was afraid of happening again. Although South Africa was now in the time of post apartheid people still held onto the fear that it was too good to be true.

As the main character is running to find his family members, he realizes its not what everyone believes but in fact fifteen or so zombies shambling towards the small shanty town.

"I switched from Xhosa to English, "Please! I begged, "You have to run!" I reached for her, but she stabbed my hand. I left her there, I didn't know what else to do. She is still in my memory, when I sleep, or maybe when I close my eyes sometimes. Sometimes she's my mother and the crying children are my sisters."

 

The main character's story ends with him waking up in a hospital, over hearing people talking about "rabies."

 

Israel.

Seriously. Israel is super smart. Everyone should get that down on paper right now. If you're taking notes, (why wouldn't you be?) Write down: Israel knows what they're doing.

Jurgen Warmbrunn is too smart for his own good. But he's got stronger morals than the smuggler or Fernando, so when he finds stuff out, he actually tries to do something about it.

 

"Most people don't believe something can happen unless it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature. I don't blame anyone for not believing."

 

Jurgen Warmbrunn knows that the only people who read his report on his findings were the people in charge of Israel. (Don't worry, we'll get there next, so good.) And he knows that if they just listened to him things would have turned out a lot differently, so he speaks with the voice of man filled with sadness and regret. His goodness allows him to not be bitter.

 

He gets word of his special decoding software not working quite right so he decides to investigate. (He's smart, remember?)

 

"I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself... it all had to do with a viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berserker. Of course I didn't believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended."

 

Jurgen Warmbrunn goes on to explain why he decided to look into the whole zombie theory. It all had to do with The Fourth Arab-Israeli war in October of 1973. It started on a holy day when no one thought anything was going to happen. From then on, everyone agreed to question the impossible. Because they had learned from their mistakes.

 

"Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on the wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks its necessary."

 

The report he writes contains all the information anyone ever needs. The problem is, no one reads it.

 

Bethlehem, Palestine

 

Great men don't have to be in great positions to be great. They exist in every faucet of the world. I love this story more than all the stories before it.

 

"Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie, who didn't? When the Israeli ambassador announced to the UN General Assembly that his country was enacting a policy of "voluntary quarantine," what was I supposed to think? Was I really supposed to believe his crazy story that African rabies was actually a new plague that transformed dead bodies into blood thirsty cannibals? How can you possibly believe that kind of foolishness, especially when it comes from your most hated enemy?"

"offering asylum, no questions asked, to any foreign-born Jew, any foreigner of Israeli-born parents, any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and any Palestinian whose family had once lived within the borders of Israel. That last part applied to my family, refugees from the '67 War of Zionist aggression."

 

Saladin Kader is clearly onboard with the whole, 'we hate Israel' idea and his testimony really lays it on thick. Saladin Kader is not the great man I'm referring to. But rather, his father, who can put aside his hatred for the good of his family. Because his love for them is more important than a war that has gone on for years and years.

 

"My father wasn't quite convinced of my ingenious geopolitical insights. He was a janitor at Amiri Hospital. He'd been on duty the night it had its first major African rabies outbreak. He hadn't personally seen the bodies rise from their slabs or the carnage of panicked patients and security guards, but he'd witnessed enough of the aftermath to convince him that staying in Kuwait was suicidal. He'd made up his mind to leave same day Israel made their declaration."

 

Saladin Kader was convinced that this was just a sly way of the Israelis withdrawing because they were losing. He wanted to prove it terribly to his father.

 

"The Israelis had withdrawn from all occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem! All the factional fighting, the violence between our various resistance organizations, I knew that would die down once we unified for the final blow against the Jews."

 

His father wasn't worried about any of that, he was worried about keeping his family safe. Again. His love was greater than anything else.

 

"I, of course, scoffed at his timid ignorance, at his willingness to abandon "The Struggle." What else could I expect from a man who'd spent his whole life scrubbing toilets in the country that treated our people only slightly better than its Filipino guest workers. He'd lost his perspective, his self-respect. The Zionist were offering the hollow promise of a better life. and he was jumping at it like a dog with scraps."

 

The final straw in the argument between Saladin Kader and his father was when Saladin tells him that he's joined a youth based terrorist organization and he's gonna go be a terrorist. He's very proud of this declaration.

 

"He was also not an angry man; I don't think he ever raised his voice. I saw something in his eyes, something I didn't recognize and then suddenly he was on me, a lightening whirlwind that threw me up against the wall, slapped me so hard my left ear rang. "You WILL go!" he shouted as he grabbed my shoulders and repeatedly slammed me against the cheap drywall. "I am your father! You WILL OBEY ME!" His next slap sent my vision flashing white. "YOU WILL LEAVE WITH THIS FAMILY OR WHILL NOT LEAVE THIS ROOM ALIVE!" More grabbing and shoving, shouting and slapping. I didn't understand where this man had come from. This lion that had replaced my docile, frail excuse for a parent. A lion protecting his cubs. He knew that fear was the only weapon he had left to save my life and I didn't fear the threat of the plague, than dammit, I was going to fear him!"

 

Saladin gets the message and the whole family packs up and moves. There may have been crying.

 

"As we approached the border, I saw the Wall for the first time. It was still unfinished, naked steal beams rising above the concrete foundation. I'd known about the infamous "security fence" - what citizen of the Arab world didn't- but I'd always believed that it only surrounded the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Out here, in the middle of this barren desert, it only confirmed my theory that the Israelis were expecting an attack along their border."

 

"At Taba, we were taken off the bus and told to walk, single file, past cages that held very large and fierce looking dogs. We went one at a time."

 

"As he passed the dogs, they went wild, howling and snarling, biting and charging at the confines of their cages. Instantly, two large chaps in civilian clothing were at the old man's side, speaking something in his ear and escorting him away. I could see the man was injured. His dishdasha was torn at the hip and stained with brown blood. These men were certainly no doctors, however, and the black, unmarked van they escorted him to was certainly no ambulance."

 

"Then it was our turn to walk the gauntlet of dogs. They didn't bark at me, nor the rest of my family."

 

"The man after us, however... again came the barks and growls, again came the nondescript civilians. I turned to look at him and surprised to see a white man. ... 'C'mon, man, what the fuck?' He was well dressed, a suit and tie, matching luggage that was tossed aside as he began to fight with the Israelis. 'Dude, c'mon, get the fuck off me! I'm one of you! C'mon!'"

 

 

Slowly, the racism starts to fall away as Saladin notices what's really going on around him.

 

"The man who examined us was from Jabaliya in Gaza and had himself been a detainee only a few months before. He kept telling us, 'You made the right decision to come here. You'll see. I know it's hard, but you'll see it was the only way.' He told us it was all true, everything the Israelis had said. I still couldn't bring myself to believe him, even though a growing part of me wanted to."

 

And then the Israeli Civil War started and his entire world changed.

 

"The battle raging all around us wasn't an uprising by Palestinian insurgents, but the opening shots of the Israeli Civil War."

 

"I realize I practically didn't know anything about these people I'd hated my entire life. Everything I thought was true went up in smoke that day, supplemented by the face of our real enemy."

 

As the war rages around them one of the nondescript black vans busts open and the walking dead come staggering out and all hell breaks loose.

 

"Suddenly I understood what my father had been trying to warn me about, what the Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about! What I couldn't understand was why the rest of the world wasn't listening."

 

 

 

 

Thus concludes all of the stories from part one.
On one end you have the good guys. Moral, sound judgment, willing to do the right thing. On the other hand you have those who are easily morally corrupted. It was no stretch to see which side furthered the infestation and which side made moves to try and stop it. But the morally corrupt has already been hard at work just not caring long before the good starts to catch up.

If this isn't a commentary on everyday life, I don't know what is.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Blame, or not. Because, this was super long.