Monday, February 26, 2007

New Beginnings and World War Z

Welcome.

Hello.

This is RoboNixon, tuning in, finally, at Disappear Here. This is where mass media will be consumed, digested, and analyzed for your ... pleasure seems like the wrong word. Distraction. For your distraction.

I recently discovered the novel WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR by Max Brooks on the floor of an acquaintance's room, buried beneath copies of Y: THE LAST MAN and my own copy of MARVELS. I picked it up, bored, remembering I had promised its owner I would, one day, dig into it and return for discussion.

Twenty-Four hours later, the books was done. I had eaten the entire novel, not literally, of course, in a day.

Written as a series of interviews a decade or so after the end of World War Z, the ten year long battle against the illogical rise of zombies takes itself mostly serious, with elements of parody and satire in the proceedings.

Using interviews from subjects dispersed around the world, all survivors, of course, of the struggle that took place, Brooks' work is thrilling, amusing, and at times disturbing, conveying the sense of desperation and horror of the events as they unfold.

It doesn't serve me to summarize the book -- that's what the rest of the internets is for. Rather, I'd like to discuss certain chapters, "interviews," that have been floating around in my head since I read it.

One chapter in particular occurs towards the middle of the zombie war. A pilot doing airlift missions to the isolated areas of human survivors on the east coast of the USA finds her ship downed in Louisiana, on her own in a swamp infested with, of course, zombies.

The pilot tells her story of bare-survival with emotion; were it not for an isolated "skywatcher" named Mets who talks to her over her radio, guiding her to safety, the pilot insists she would be dead.

The story itself is fairly spartan, detailing the landing, an initial confrontation near the body of one of her co-crew members, her discovery of a half-submerged Humvee, and the final battle and escape. What is notable is the emotional attachment between the pilot and Mets -- between the person fighting for their life, the other fighting to motivate her. It isn't until the end of the "interview' that Brooks discloses that according to all records, there is no Mets, there is no skywatcher by that name, and that after the crash of her plane the pilot's radio was broken.

The story is haunting for a variety of reasons. Brooks, who in other passages has characters representing Howard Dean, Karl Rove, and Bill Maher (not to mention the variety of other pseudo-vague references to real-world characters), manages to keep his genetic propensity for comedy subdued, making the story of isolation in a world of danger more relatable. The sparse storytelling, the gray visuals, the no-nonsense attitude of the interviewee all contribute towards the story's twist: that is, that there is no Mets. That the pilot created her out of the ether to keep herself focused, to drive her towards her ultimate goal: survival and evacuation.

There are a few other stories that end in twists such as this, but none is as affecting as the story of this trained pilot cracking. Hell, in a world at war with billions of zombies, wouldn't you?

The fact that the United States is the de-facto leader of the Zombie Resistance is also comforting; despite our current (and, I suppose, inevitable) flaws, the near-future that the book exists in has what is left of the world uniting behind a USA lead plan to eliminate the zombie threat, a USA united behind a coalition government with President Colin Powell-Facsimile and Vice President Howard Dean-type, "the Whacko." In a fictional apocalypse of the undead, it's still nice to know that the "individualism" of the USA is what gives it the highest survivor ratio in the world, as well as the leadership to eliminate zombies from its borders, then Canada, then Mexico.

Patriotism aside, it's a fun book, a quick read, and worth your time, zombie-fetishist or not.

RoboNixon