World War Z [audiobooks]

I’m not an audiobook shill, I swear — I don’t like EVERY book that’s read to me aloud, my post raving about The Best Of American Erotica 2008’s audiobook version notwithstanding. You guys don’t hear about the ones that aren’t good. But one that is quite good is World War Z, which is a series of selections of survivor’s tales from Max Brook’s follow-on novel to his first Zombie Survivor’s Guide. Where the ZSG was funny and light, World War Z is delivered in complete deadpan and presented as a collected series of personal narratives that trace the Undead Plague from outbreak to reclamation. After listening to the survivor’s accounts from all over the world, describing the reactions of governments and individuals from different groups (e.g. the movie-stars who attempt to set up a Real World House to ride out the plague to the U.S. families who fled to the relative safety of Cuba in make-shift rafts), the seemingly difficult to swallow premise is readily taken as fact.

The book spends its time detailing how our world would react to a zombie apocalypse, and those reactions follow logically from the world we live in today. At its core, World War Z does what good fantasy novels do: they use fanciful circumstances to show you something interesting, funny, and/or tragic — but essentially human and “real.”

I’m oddly reminded of Tim O’Brien’s collection of fictional stories of soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried. It was one of the first examples I encountered of how an author can use fictional narrative to relate the reality of an experience better than can be accomplished with a purportedly factual description of events. That idea sounds daft at first, but many veterans thought O’Brien’s fictional work described the experience of that war better than many of the purportedly factual accounts.

Without going too deeply into literary theory, there’s ALWAYS an author. There’s no “true” account of anything. Even if you witness a moment in time for yourself, your attentive focus, your mood, your personal relationship(s) to the subject, your physical vantage point — so much effects the multiple and layered experiential reactions we each have that a strong argument can be made that communication always deals in fictions. A fiction well-written to speak to the emotional experience of an event can get you closer to reality than watching a documentary. It’s odd, but a collection of stories that show humanity reacting to the unanticipated can give glimpses of something more “real” than you would expect.

So, if you like reading, read it. If you like listening, which I do, you should really listen to this read by this cast. Different voice-actors play different parts for the different accounts, and it’s amazing how they are able to capture all of the world’s accents and cultural interplay through stellar casting. I’m sure that will come across on the page as well, because Brooks has written the British guy British, and the Israeli guy very much Israeli, if that makes sense. And because the stories are episodic, it’s also easier than a lot of other fiction to listen to for a bit and then put to the side (although I ended up trying to listen to several accounts at a stretch just because it really draws you in). Not to mention that the actors they get to read these parts aren’t small change (Mark Hamill, Alan Alda, Henry Rollins, Rob Reiner, Carl Reiner, Jürgen Prochnow, and John Turturro). I did not know until I did this write-up that it was awarded the “Audie Award” for the best multi-voice performance in 2007, and I couldn’t agree more.