R is a zombie – and he’s called R because it’s the one
fragment of his name he has managed to remember. He and his fellow zombies
follow the parodies of the living, aping human life but never really getting
the reality of it. In between raiding the living to find food and, above all,
brains – brains that contain the precious memories of the living that reignite
what it means to be alive in the zombies. He lives in the airport, in his plane
with his collection of human memorabilia and 50s records trying to reignite his
humanity.
On one such raid he eat the brain of a man called Perry – and his brain lit up. He saw Perry’s girlfriend, Julie, and was driven to protect her rather than eat her. He brought her home to his plane and slowly they come to know each other. But, more, R sees more and more of Perry’s life and Perry’s memories, reliving his hopes and dreams – and his descent. The longer he and Julie spend together, the more R begins to wake up, the more he can remember and talk and think. The more alive he feels
And this vitality is spreading – but the Bonies, the most rotten and reduced of the zombies, are ready to fight back
This is a book that’s surrounded by some truly confusing
marketing. When I picked it up, I was told by all and sundry that it was
another Twilight. I cringed, expecting a vapid, personality-less heroine and a
creepy, stalking hero who was supposed to be romantic.
This book is nothing like Twilight
I watched the trailers for the Warm Bodies film and
expected a comedy, something funny and light and clever and amusing.
This book is not a comedy, nor is it light.
This book is surprisingly deep, amazingly solid and full
of extremely powerful food for thought.
This is a dystopia, but unlike many dystopias, this is
not decades after the end of the world, nor is it mere weeks. The remains of
humanity aren’t in a desperate second by second battle for survival, nor have
they built much in the way of a new society. Humanity is surviving. Day by day,
in their secure centres, surviving with little or no real hope for an actual
future. Everything is about survival, killing the zombies and surviving.
Anything else is a distraction, it’s grim, it’s hard and General Grigio doesn’t
accept any deviation from that, not even from his own daughter.
Then there’s the zombies, feeding on human brains for some
spark of human emotion, trying to recapture some sense of what they were,
unable to even pull up their own names, their own identities. They’re trapped
in bodies that find so many tasks and even basic communication difficult, but
also find even caring to be beyond them. Lead by the Bonies, rotted down
zombies that are the very essence of stagnation and inevitability.
It’s a powerful book that asks what life actually is and
what it means. What is the point of life if everything is reduced to survival,
is it even living if you’re just living to survive rather than surviving to
live and are you even living if you don’t have any hope for the future, any
desires or any wishes. It asks what living actually means and what actually
matters.
We see this really well portrayed several ways – with Julie’s
difficulty with the stifling and repressive and empty life they live in the stadium.
We see it with R’s slow growth from his near-mindless zombie state. And we see
it really well through the eyes of Perry’s memories, as he grew colder and
harder, as he lost his hope, as he began seeking death and how, ultimately, he
became a dead man walking – as much a zombie as R was before he began to
reclaim the spark of life.
