Review: World War Z

World War Z
by Max Brooks
New York: Crown Publishers, 2006.
Completed June 19, 2013

I like zombie-stuff.  "Night of the Living Dead", "The Walking Dead", "Marvel Zombies"...  "Zombieland" is a movie my daughter and I share an affection for.  World War Z takes it to a new level.  First person narrative accounts in the aftermath of the war was the ideal way to tell the story.  It provided a level of realism that took my breath away.  I don't know how the movie will begin to touch the book.  I hope, for Brad Pitt's sake, that he doesn't even try.

The best zombie 'stuff' is never about the zombies.  It is about the human drama that is taken to an existential extreme because of the threat to our very existence.  World War Z, in that vein, is not about zombies.  Rather, it documents the human condition after the worst possible circumstances.  And we come out hopeful.

I think Max Brooks did an amazing job drawing out the different perspectives of our global village, portraying national identities, defining individual stories, all tied together yet individual in their tellings. 

SPOILER ALERT: There was one point that really cut me to the quick.  It was the role of the chaplain, the minister of God, in the war.  It had to be Russian.  Novels, and in particular science fiction novels, let you think about things in ways that nothing else does.

I've run into this idea before, in the movie DOOM, in the second of the "Starship Troopers" movie, the idea of what happens to the human being when something takes over their mental faculties, what is their responsibility-and, by extension, what is God's love for them?  Goes to an extreme in considering God's love for all of us, no matter who we are.

The answer in the above examples was the person taking their own life before being taken over.  World War Z goes to another place with it.  Typical zombie thing, they bite you, infect you, you become one of them.  In the World War, there are soldier who get bitten, then infected.  Brooks sets the scenario that the usual response, killing them outright, is not an option.

So who kills the infected?  They haven't turned, but they are going to, it is inevitable.  They will become the instruments of the destruction of their friends and comrades if something isn't done.  At first, it is the responsibility of the officers and NCO's, who are quickly overwhelmed by the task.  There is enough in leading these men and women to their possible deaths, much less pulling the trigger if they, in the combat against the undead, become infected by them.  So the task then passes to the victims themselves, to end their own lives before they become the very thing their army fights.

So enters the chaplain, the presence of God in the lives of these people.  How do you give pastoral care to those who are so doomed?  Tie to that the sinfulness implicit in suicide in Christian thought and what is the natural progression?  Should it not be the chaplain, the presence of God, who takes on the role of he or she that releases the souls of the doomed to God?

The passage describing the chaplain taking out his sidearm is chilling.