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World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War,
by Max Brooks. Crown, 2006, 342 pages.
Gray in Tooth and Claw by Andrew Ferguson
Science fiction, according to the critic Brian Aldiss, is "hubris clobbered by nemesis": endless riffs on the theme of humanity unleashing forces it cannot ultimately control. Until the late 1960s, the zombie tale fit comfortably into that definition: some mad priest or scientist uses arcane rituals or forbidden science to reanimate corpses, which invariably go on a rampage. After the zombies (or ghouls, or revenants, or whatever name they go by in the story) are brought back under control, the hero will inevitably discover the madman's body and proclaim, "He should never have tampered in God's domain." | | Andrew Ferguson is managing editor of Liberty. |
| The films of George A. Romero changed all that. As is the case with many groundbreaking works of art, it's difficult now to appreciate his first zombie movie, "Night of the Living Dead," because every element of the film has been so thoroughly picked over by the imitators that trailed behind. But look past the low-budget production, the lower-budget cast, and the smorgasbord of cultural clichés. Imagine yourself in the audience in 1968, an audience composed almost entirely of adolescents and teenagers (then as now the target market for B-movie horror), an audience accustomed to giant creatures and Karo syrup. As Roger Ebert wrote back then:
The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.
I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them. . . . they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. . . .
I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater . . . I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.
A couple of minutes into the movie, the zombies appear without cause or explanation, and at the end of the movie there is still no reason given for their existence beyond blind, dumb misfortune. There is no tampering, and this domain is not God's; there isn't even a madman's corpse to declaim over. Instead, the body is the hero's, gunned down by a militiaman who mistook him for a ghoul.
Or perhaps it isn't a mistake: in Romero's movies, there is ultimately no difference between the living and the undead. His humans are by turns catatonic, belligerent, and all-consuming; they need no nemesis because they do a fine job clobbering themselves. By the time the third movie rolls around, zombies have all but overrun the earth, and the last representatives of humanity (as they suppose) are spending their final hours squabbling in an army base. The descent into despair is complete: there is but one philosophical problem left, and that is suicide.
Fast forward a few decades, and Romero's vision has become pervasive, infecting not only the innumerable zombie-apocalypse tributes and ripoffs, but also genres as disparate as urban legends and news coverage (for a hand in hand example, see the lurid tales of Superdome ghouls after Hurricane Katrina). The "zombie" as cultural metaphor is almost unspeakably trite, and even the idea of our species becoming extinct by means not of our making is a bit passé. Last year a tenured professor in Texas basked in the adulation of his peers after speaking fondly of the extermination by Ebola of the bulk of humanity; the rapturous applause from his audience proved that the acceptance of the proposition "mankind=zombies" is not limited to horror buffs and sociopaths.
What is limited is the ability to follow the trail that led Romero to his bleak conclusion. The zombie tale that he reacted against is another form of the "Two Peoples" class myth, dividing humanity into the leisure class and the working class, which in science fiction found its purest formulation in the Eloi and Morlocks of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine." In the older, mad-scientist version, the zombie story is a political cautionary tale: the scientist exploits the zombies by ordering them to do his bidding; ultimately, they rebel against him and bring down the society he represents. Wells and his fellows at the Fabian Society believed that such a revolution was neither necessary nor desirable, that social justice could arise through education and legislative reforms.
| | Brooks departs from Romero's zombie narrative, asserting that there is a difference between humanity and the "living dead," after all.
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| But by 1968, the tenor had changed. The Great Society — a social program the Fabians could barely have dreamed of achieving — was floundering, its inevitable bankruptcy hastened by a continually escalating war. While American troops and treasury bled for no discernible goal, the heirs of the socialist tradition busied themselves in squabbles over ever smaller pieces of political turf. With both education and legislative reform failing to produce the requisite social justice, the Morlocks felt the need and desire for a revolution — but the best they could manage was to "occupy" various places, or perhaps mill about in a mildly threatening way. Some critics point to Vietnam as the ultimate inspiration for "Night of the Living Dead," but would Romero really need to look any farther than that year's Democratic National Convention in Chicago for an example of a bloody conflict altogether devoid of human intellect?
No surprise then that he portrayed consciousness as something its possessors are either unable or unwilling to save, nor that his successors accept that portrayal without thought, and grapple with nothing save each other. They're proud of their lives in a post-conscious world, producing mindless entertainment for the zombie masses, wish-fulfillment fantasies for a collective with nothing left to wish for. So what if their works all shamble towards no particular destination, moaning without communicating, gnawing at great gouts of flesh with no thought of sating their hunger? Isn't that the way it's always been?
With its gritty, blood-spattered cover art and apocalyptic jacket-flap prose — "The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity" — one could be forgiven for thinking that Max Brooks' "World War Z" is just a new costume for the old corpse. But read on: "[T]he book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. . . . And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?" The words after the ellipsis are excerpted from the introduction, in which Brooks marks his departure from Romero's zombie narrative by a) having humanity survive its conflict with the "living dead," and b) asserting that there is a difference, after all.
The form of the novel is well chosen to underscore that distinction. As the subtitle indicates, "World War Z" is an oral history, owing much to the works of Studs Terkel (in particular "The Good War," about the survivors of World War II). The narrative emerges over the course of a series of interviews that Brooks as interviewer conducts all over the globe. The array of individuals Brooks presents, each speaking in his own voice (and the difficulty of writing in that many voices should not be underestimated), allows him a constant contrast between the variety and adaptability of human beings and the gray uniformity of the undead hordes.
The story begins in China with the doctor called into a remote village to investigate a young boy later known as "Patient Zero," supposedly the epidemiological starting point for the zombie outbreak. Within an hour of his report, agents of the Chinese government swoop in to quarantine the town — but too late: already the boy has bitten others.
As the infection spreads throughout the countryside, everyone who can leave, does — including many who are already infected, but do not succumb to the virus until they are already en route. From this migration the infection spreads throughout the world; however, since the Chinese government refuses to acknowledge what has happened on their watch (more on that later), the nature and extent of the threat is largely unknown until it has become a pandemic, and it is clear that humanity must fight to survive.
Unfortunately, those in control of the machines of war are believers in Romero's vision — and is that any real surprise? Over the decades they have become accustomed to regarding their men as zombies; naturally, their plan to deal with the zombie "army" is to overwhelm it through superior firepower, the same way our military has defeated human armies for the past few decades (then, it's been the peace that's proven impossible to hold). This strategy leads to disaster at the Battle of Yonkers,1 where the U.S. Army, burdened with unnecessary equipment and unreliable information, is smothered by the mass of walking dead that was once the population of New York City. Says one veteran of Yonkers, "The fact that we couldn't shock and awe [the zombies] boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed [them] to shock and awe us!"
| It seems mankind is about to give in to despair, when up pops a mad scientist with a plan to save humanity by tampering in God's domain.
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| The shock of the defeat reverberates around the world, and it seems as if mankind is about to give in to despair — when up pops a mad (social) scientist, with a plan to save humanity by tampering in God's domain. The madman is Paul Redeker, formerly disaster manager for South Africa's apartheid regime; the tampering involves deciding who lives and who dies, by determining which areas of the country are still defensible given the resources at hand — with everyone outside those areas left to fend for themselves. The Redeker Plan is dispassionate, cold, and absolutely the last hope for victory. With the approval of no less a statesman than Nelson Mandela, it is put into effect, and soon copied by every other nation that hadn't, like Israel or North Korea (albeit in very different ways), already sealed itself off.
From there the story splits to follow those inside the protective zones, seeking to regroup and then reclaim territory, and those outside, seeking to survive long enough to be reclaimed.2 By the time the two threads are one again, the war is all but over: a few smaller landmasses remain fully infested, and there are zombies still wandering the sea floor, along with a few thousand above the frost line thawing out each spring. But the threat of extinction has been averted; the greatest danger left is complacency — one slip in concentration and the zombie menace will return.
After finishing "World War Z," I worried that, for all his remarks about vigilance, Brooks may have let his attention slip towards the end. A number of questions still needed answering, the two most important being: where did the zombie virus come from in the first place? And, if the young boy truly was Patient Zero, how did the Chinese government operatives know exactly what to expect when they arrived?
Brooks does provide answers; however, they're only hinted at in his oral history (which as an impressionistic form is better suited to showing the outline of an idea than the idea itself). For the full picture we must turn to his previous book on zombies, a seeming parody of the "Worst Case Scenario" handbooks called "The Zombie Survival Guide." Inside are information on zombie physiology and behavior, tips on how to stay alive during zombie infestations (whether local or global), as well as a short survey of suspected and verified zombie outbreaks throughout history.
Putting together the pieces of the survey reveals that the zombie virus is nothing new; it's a sporadic threat that humans have dealt with for at least three or four thousand years: the Egyptians removed the brain during mummification after incidents of mummies "coming back to life"; Hadrian built his wall in Britain to keep out hordes of soldiers with blue-tinted skin; the colony of Roanoke was put to the ban after an outbreak, by an Indian tribe that had seen that sort of thing before — by technology and taboo, humanity had kept zombies at bay for millennia. Why then the pandemic at the beginning of the 21st century?
Two reasons: first, increased traffic in people and their parts — the speed of modern travel means that carriers can travel to uninfested corners of the globe while the virus is still incubating, and technologies such as blood transfusions and organ transplants allow for infections without any bites at all. Second, the breakdown of taboos amid the ever-widening scope of warfare — if zombies did exist, how long would it take, in an age of firebombs, mustard gas, and nukes, for a modern government to try using them as weapons?
As Brooks tells it, the first military power to undertake military research on zombies was imperial Japan, but out of the 50 specimens they developed (mostly former political dissidents), only one made it to the battlefield — and that one was captured at the orders of Mao and delivered to the Great Leader himself. From there, further Chinese research seems inevitable, perhaps aided by the prior Soviet capture of a Japanese zombie research facility in Manchukuo. Knowing as we do the sort of tactics Mao was prepared to use to accomplish his revolution, it is reasonable to assume that in Brooks' world, zombies would be dispatched to infect troublesome villages, which would in turn be cleared by specially trained security forces — similar to those that would, several decades later, respond to the report on Patient Zero.
Thus, though the zombie virus itself is a natural phenomenon on the order of influenza or the bubonic plague, the responsibility for its metastasis should be attributed primarily to those governments which experimented on their populations,3 and secondarily to those which continued to spread misinformation about the virus and deny its existence. As Brooks writes in the conclusion to his "Zombie Survival Guide":
At this rate, attacks will only increase, culminating in one of two possibilities. The first is that world governments will have to acknowledge, privately and publicly, the existence of the living dead, creating special organizations to deal with the threat. In this scenario, zombies will become an accepted part of daily life — marginalized, easily contained, perhaps even vaccinated against. A second, more ominous scenario would result in an all-out war between the living and the dead: a war you are now ready for.
The subsequent publication of "World War Z" indicates which of the two he believes more likely. Nemesis has returned to the zombie tale, and its name is government.
How endangered are we by the zombies that inhabit certain parts of our society? Will we know when it is time to enact our own Redeker Plan, and cut loose, say, the public school system? It is easy to look at the institutions around us, as Romero did, and despair of ever again seeing any sign of intellect at work.4 Much more difficult to distinguish between what we can save, and what we must for the time being relinquish to the mindless hordes — with no guarantee of any reward for our efforts beyond an infectious bite, or a bullet to the head.
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| 1 | In the choice of battlefield, I can't help but hear an echo of "The Battle of Dorking," the 1871 short story by George Tomkyns Chesney that inaugurated and encapuslated the genre of "invasion literature," in which a country unprepared for battle is suddenly overrun. In Chesney's story, the residents of the small town of Dorking attempt to use Napoleonic-era tactics to repel a German attack on British soil. Fifty years later, England still hadn't recovered from the shock of the defeat. |
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| 2 | Among those on the outside is Queen Elizabeth, who spurns the safety of the Isle of Man to remain in the besieged Windsor Castle; Brooks' portrayal of her shows an appreciation for noblesse oblige that I thought I'd never see from a contemporary American author.
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| 3 | The U.S. government, of course, is not exempt from this category; Brooks records an outbreak in Los Angeles that was initially put down after the zombies were caught between two rival gangs fighting for turf, but from later, smaller incidents in the city's underground, it's likely that some of them survived, and were sealed off in unused tunnels for later study. Meanwhile, the gang members who saved a great many lives by shooting zombies for a few hours rather than each other were, of course, sent away for life in prison.
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| 4 | Beginning with his third "Dead" movie, Romero did open up the possibility of intelligence returning to the world, in the form of zombies capable of using tools and eventually of organizing other zombies against the last bastions of humanity — a curious return to the "Two Peoples" society; apparently he decided some zombies are more equal than others.
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