Oh Internet

World War Z - Max Brooks

My thinking goes like this: If you can, while browsing around a book shop, come across a book entitled “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” and somehow not buy it, then you probably shouldn’t ever try to talk to me. We just fundamentally wouldn’t be able to understand one another.

Presented as a series of transcriptions of a journalist’s audio interviews with survivors of a worldwide zombie pandemic, the book covers a lot of ground and a lot of characterisation styles. It’s split roughly evenly between the military viewpoint and personal stories of normal civilians caught up in the conflict, and mimics the modern real-world war documentary style perfectly.

Like all good zombie stories, it’s not about schlock-horror scares at all. On an individual’s level, it’s about responses to crisis and what people will do when pushed into entirely alien situations and forced to adapt to conditions they’d never otherwise have found themselves in. From the political commentary point of view it’s about the workings and command structures of modern western militaries, and why introducing them to foreign cultures tends to be disasterous. Every short, personal story in the book is pitched absolutely perfectly and you entirely forget you’re reading about a cheesy old movie cliche.

I think this has jumped to the top of my ‘book of the year’ pile so far.

The Prestige - Chrisopher Priest

The film adaptation of this book recently came out and so being the “culturally illiterate yet wishing to appear erudite” slob that I am, I decided to read the book just before it reached cinemas. Then after I finished it, I never actually got around to seeing the film. Ho-hum.

Anyway, the book is fantastic and worth reading whether or not you’re planning to see the movie. It follows the lives of two feuding 19th century magicians, and the resonances their rivalry has with their current-day decendants. The two main sections of the book describe the same events in their lives told from each magician’s perspective. There’s a wonderful “meta” feel to the whole thing, since much of the body of the work is describing the misdirections and clever construction of the tricks being performed, but at the same time the author is entirely up-front about the fact that the same prestidigitation is being performed on the reader over the course of the whole story. It’s very intricately laid out, but without ever making you feel like you’ve missed any important plot elements through not catching on fast enough.

It’s a wonderfully creepy experience, especially towards the end and should ideally be read just before falling asleep for full effect.

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman

After the last single-author short story volume I went through turned out to be a bit of a dissapointment, this was a great antidote. Neil Gaiman is a fairly prolific short story writer, so this collection was able to be built up from a large collection over an extended period of time (It’s been 8 years since Smoke and Mirrors was released,) and as a result there are almost no dissapointments in the bunch.

There are some quite well known and widely distributed stories such as “A Study in Emerald” (Arthur Conan Doyle meets H.P. Lovecraft) and “The Monarch of the Glen” (a continuation of American Gods set in the Scottish Highlands,) as well as lots that only had very limited releases.

All of the stories tend towards the slightly spooky and supernatural, with even the more “mundane” settings having some unusual twist hiding within. Not many authors can pull off the trick of producing deeply unusual flights of fancy while still being respected in the “serious” literary circles, so it’s lovely to watch while it happens.

Underground - Haruki Murakami

Murakami’s usual style is very surrealist and interpritave fiction, where you never feel entirely grounded in the familiar as you read, so it’s impressive that this entirely real-world piece of witness journalism manages to seem just as alien and distanced as anything else he’s produced.

He traces the story of the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway through a series of interviews with victims of the attack and with members of the Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo cult that was responsible for the incident. Through recounting the individual’s stories, he tries to create an impression of modern-day Japan’s cultural aura.

The feeling of ‘other’-ness is split into two flavours. The victim interviews are remarkable for how tolerant and unmoved most of the people involved seem. With a few exceptions, most of people who were caught up in the attack don’t seem to be particularly angry towards the perpetrators or about the hardships they faced during their (often painful) recoveries, and quietly carried on without feeling that there was anything they could do or wanted to do about what happened. (Reading it feels oddly similar to some of the coping strategies in World War Z, projected onto a real-life situation.)

The interviews with the Aum members seem more illuminating. While none of the interviewees were directly involved in the attack, it does build up a fascinating picture of a religious group which originally did a lot of good for many of its members but was eventually warped by drifting more overtly to the cult of personality of its leader Shoko Asahara. It’s quite a stark picture of the way in which people who didn’t quite fit into everyday norms felt pushed aside by their culture to the extent that they joined this group as the only viable alternative they could see, and of how different societies accept or reject various types of abnormal behaviour. (Or it might just be that my inner-nerd was having it’s buttons pushed.)

A very interesting but uncomfortable read.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Books, Media Consumption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.