HappyEnglishLand

-Lauren Cole

 

My first reaction to the idea of reading a book about Zombies must have been something like, "Cool!" followed immediately by "I’ve gotta tell Jason [a friend of mine who owns "The Zombie Survival Guide," and intensely believes that he will need to use it any day now] about this!" I was excited about the prospect of a good read, and World War Z has not let me down.

The first thing I noticed about the book was Brooks’ amazing affinity for effectively descriptive prose. For example, here’s an excerpt I especially liked:

"Anyone left alive will either have the air sucked right out of their longs, or – and they’ll never admit this to anyone – have their lungs ripped right out of their mouth. Obviously no one’s going to live long enough to tell that kind of horror story, probably why the Pentagon’s been so good at covering up the truth, but if you ever see a picture of a G, or ever an example of a real walking specimen, and he’s got both air bags and windpipes just dangling out of his lips, make sure you give him my number. I’m always up for meeting another veteran of Yonkers." (WWZ, page 104)

As this passage illustrates, Brooks possesses great descriptive talent. All you need to know is given by that paragraph. You "get the picture" of what he is saying. Yet, he’s not drenching the paragraph with a sea of metaphors. He simply doesn’t need to. The above paragraph is a perfect description without being "flowery." As a writer, I can truly appreciate this fine balance between including enough details to draw your audience into your alternate universe, and avoiding a tendency to become mundane – or worse, to sound over-the-top and make your audience laugh where they were supposed to cry! For instance, Brooks could have said "Anyone left alive will die a tragic death, watching as the very breath of their lungs is ripped away, like the painful waxing of hairs from tender flesh," but this would have almost made me giggle. His straightforward manner, then, is much better suited to the oral history narrative of a world stricken by war that he is telling.

I expected World War Z to draw me into such a world, one taken over by zombies and worldwide fear, so I had the "general feel" of the book right, but there were a couple of things I didn’t expect. First, I didn’t expect there to be multiple speakers – for some reason I expected one man to tell his experience of the war from beginning to end. Now that I have read a fair amount of the book, I can see that this take on a war chronicle simply wouldn’t work. It’s a world war, and for a world war to be understood, one needs to gain a world perspective. The interview format of the novel lends itself nicely to this purpose, for the audience is able to understand a number of things that an individual would not be able to portray. An individual is unable to be in several places at once, and so interviewing people from around the world enables the audience to see the war from several simultaneous perspectives. This gives them the "international flavor," or the circumstances that helped or hindered different nations, and the people’s responses. We are able to see common threads like fear, and dread, and desperation, but also differences in how different places handled the problem. For instance, some tried to get out via interstates, and failed simply to lack of organization, while in other countries, armies wiped out innocent and uninfected people in a desperate attempt to eradicate (or at least locate) the plague. So, needless to say, I enjoyed reading the variety of perspectives, despite the fact that I initially thought this would be confusing. To the contrary, it was entirely enlightening.

Another aspect of the book that I did not expect was the immense volume of political parallels to our current situation. I was blown away by the implicit sociopolitical commentary that is embedded so deep in Brooks’ work. For instance, take a look at this line from page eighty-six: "He didn’t just want to ride out the storm in comfort and luxury, he wanted every to know he’d done it. That was the celebrity angle, his way of ensuring high-profile." This type of commentary drew me in even further, for I am certainly politically opinionated, and I enjoyed seeing these ideas portrayed in unexpected ways surrounding the idea of a zombie war. I was in fact pleasantly surprised by how fast I found myself tearing through the novel. (When I first saw that I had to read over a hundred pages in two days, I was not excited, but the succulence of the novel proved to outweigh the length of the readings!)

An obvious assumption one would tend to make about a zombie novel would be that it should be scary. I didn’t really expect to be afraid, and for the most part I haven’t been. However, there has been the occasional passage which preys on human emotions so well that I was simply terrified! The first incidence of this was on page sixty-six where Mary Jo Miller is describing the zombie’s entrance to her living room:

"He [her son] was looking past me, at the glass sliding door that led to the backyard. I turned just in time to see it shatter. It was about five foot ten, slumped, narrow shoulders with this puffy, wagging belly. It wasn’t wearing a shoulders and bulging arms. The window was broken and it had Jenna by the hair. She was screaming ‘Mommymommymommy!’" (Brooks, page 67)shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and salt-water. Aiden jumped up and ran behind me. Time was out of the chair, standing between us and that thing. In a split second, it was like all the lies fell away. Tim look frantically around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by the shirt…. I heard Jenna scream. I ran to her room, threw open the door. Another one, big, I’d say six and a half feet with giant

So far, this passage has done the best job of preying on my fear – one of watching the people I love die in front of me, while fearing for my life as well. Who would not be horrified by this? This is almost exactly my nightmare, so little digging needs to be done to figure our why it would cause such a reaction in me.

On the more positive side of my reactions, I have reached a reasonable understanding through some pensive thought and intelligent discussion (something the FDA really ought to establish a daily value of, I think). The greatest reason for my excitement: with every page of this novel, I am bathing in a Jacuzzi of delicious prose, such as the above excerpt, and the passage I pointed to in the opening paragraph. Surrounded by effective, emotion-evoking words, I am inspired write this way. People say the best way to learn a language is to throw yourself into it – move to that country and surround yourself with that language. Reading a book this rich in good writing has been equivalent to moving to HappyEnglishLand for me – I have been given a boost in learning the language of effective writing, and I am ecstatic about it. That is what this book means to me: HappyEnglishLand.