Zone One

Written by Colson Whitehead as described by The Times as “ a dark futuristic satire laced with fiendish humour”, Zone One is one of those books that works on that old adage: good things come to those who wait. If I’m honest, the good that came with my perseverance with this novel wasn’t really worth the wait as far as I’m concerned, but then again my enjoyment of this book might just have been tarnished by the fact that I had to read it for uni. You know, you somehow naturally have an instance aversion to books that you have to read… although that wasn’t the case with the last of the compulsory books: Never Let Me Go.  

Anyway, Zone One proves to be a surprisingly intricate and almost poetic zombie apocalypse novel, if you can imagine such a thing. 

The worst of the pandemic plague that turns the living into the living dead has past and Manhattan is being resettled, becoming Zone One. Armed forces made up of civilian survivors uninfected with the plague roam the streets clearing out the remaining infected ‘stragglers’. Mark Spitz is a member of one of these sweeper units, partaking in the mundane mission of eradicating malfunctioning zombies whilst simultaneously combating the rigours of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder and attempting to come to terms with this new world. Just when it seems that the surviving shreds of humanity have beaten the plague, things start to go apocalyptically wrong… 

Maybe I didn’t read this closely enough, or maybe I read it all in the wrong inflection. Whatever the reason, I just found that absolutely nothing happens for 260 pages! Perhaps this is a cheap shot on my part (in all likeliness it probably is), but believe me I don’t wish to dissuade people from reading this. Let me just say that this book is obviously not for everyone. The genre and the content alone dictate a certain acquired taste, but this is not to say that Zone One is not without its charm. There are many interesting little facets that make up this book: the central character of Mark Spitz for a start. 

The book is written in the third person register, which is obviously indicating that an omniscient being perceives the events from an external vantage point. However, the modern language and the short sentence structure intermingled with these bouts of surprising ‘poetic’ language and description make the book starkly intimate with the central character. The paradox of this is the fact that he’s always referred to as ‘Mark Spitz’ for the book’s entire duration and for all the intimate stories of his experiences and thoughts regarding the current state of the world, we actually learn very little about him in terms of get-to-know-you formalities. We know that Mark Spitz is not his actual name. It takes a long time for the author to explain the whole nickname to us. We’re kept in the dark about his music likes, his physical appearance, and all that sort of stuff. It reminds me of the heroine in Rebecca, whose name we never learn. 

I also found it particularly fascinating how the readers get this intimate relationship with Mark Spitz, but his friends and co-workers don’t. The short sentence structure and the brusqueness with which most dialogue is spoken smacks of this nonchalance and there’s a distinct lack of any emotion between characters. As I mentioned before, the book is intermittently splattered with bouts of poetic language when readers get to explore the inner folds of Mark Spitz’s mind, but there are also some subtle and (I thought) quite entertaining bouts of popular culture that bleed into the mixture: Monty Python and the Holy Grail for example (“bring out your dead!”). All this is to say that Zone One is worth reading, particularly if you’re partial to the genre. 

Filled with action, violence, comedy, and gore, it’s a different and strangely intimate zombie apocalypse novel that harbours a lot of layers for the reader to sift through. Almost like the folds of a human brain I suppose…