Classics Reissued
World War Zby Max BrooksCrown Publishing Group, 2006/2013 Sandra Bullock plays an alcoholic Taekwon-Do instructor who must help an autistic boy defeat his worst enemy – himself.Brad Pitt plays a devoted family man who risks everything to save the world and then must fight his way back - to his wife and kids.Forest Whitaker plays a scientist whose dolphin-training expertise eventually teaches him how to listen to the clicks and whistles - of his own heart.There’s an exceedingly depressing inexorability informing the biggest monstrosities that come out of Hollywood during the summer. These lumbering behemoths are all hopeful of becoming blockbusters, and like all beauty pageant contestants, they’ve made sure beforehand to carve, compress, and foot-bind themselves into virtual lock-step conformity. A very simple narrative line. An attractive protagonist who has clear, extremely personal goals. A single villain (regardless of the mayhem caused by collateral damage). $200 million in unconvincing special effects.It’s only a very rare Hollywood blockbuster that defies this pattern – most embrace it, in the hope of recouping $300 million in Indonesian box office receipts. And the pattern can be good news for summer movie-goers looking for some mindless entertainment to go with their $10 popcorn and free air conditioning (it’s possible that even some Tacitus fans will line up to see “Pacific Rim”). But that same pattern can be very, very bad news for fans of some hapless comic or book that’s battened on by studio execs and turned into a “tent-pole francise.” That way lies travesty – hence in the movie adaptations of Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson” books, the sweet-natured 12-year-old hero is played by a sour 30-year-old five-pack-a-day tobacco addict; Lee Childs’ laconic six-foot-five action hero Jack Reacher is played by nervous five-foot-two action star Tom Cruise. And, to clarify our terms here, Max Brooks’ brilliant, multi-layered 2006 novel World War Z has become … a Brad Pitt movie. The book’s millions of fans must have felt like they were collectively kicked in the stomach.The novel plays on the conceit of being an oral history of the great zombie-conflagration that almost brought all of human civilization to an end. Brooks uses dozens of speakers in dozens of carefully-differentiated narrative registers, and the story of what happened emerges gradually, in a patchwork of conflicting details and unreliable narration. The cumulative effect is that of a weirdly convincing verisimilitude; Brooks’ crackpots and his visionaries get equal time telling their stories to interviewers:
You remove the heart not long after the victim’s died … maybe even while he’s still alive … they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness … pack it in ice, put it on a place for Rio … China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the world market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituitary glands … Mother of God, who knows how many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that’s just the organs! You want to talk about the “donated” eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the planet? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren’t going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years, leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent …
By thus playing things completely straight and comparatively low-key, Brooks manages to create a zombie novel that any reader could love, provided they approached it with an open mind. His World War Z is a novel full of desperate heroism – but it most certainly is not a single hero’s journey.In other words, it’s not a Brad Pitt movie, and prospective new fans would be well-advised to keep that in mind when scanning the new-in-paperback shelves of their nearest evil big-chain bookstore: the book they’ll spot on those shelves (given the requisite hideous movie-version cover) is an infinitely more rewarding storytelling experience than anything they might just have seen on the big screen. An honest movie version of World War Z could indeed be filmed, and it might some day happen. In the meantime, newcomers shouldn’t judge a book by its cover model.
