The Book that warmed me
A Zombie with enough self-awareness to mull the meaningless of its existence gets a second chance with life through the power of love. For an ambitious love story that can easily fall into a cheesy romance clinker, Warm Bodies rose to the occasion with its clever and somatically poetic prose thanks to the brilliant strokes of writer Isaac Marion.
Not being a romance fan, I picked this book up out of curiosity to discover what had created its film version, whose novel story, witty dialogues, likable characters, and light tone had made its screen adaptation entertainingly digestible. I had never liked any teen romance film before it.
My read on the novel takes me to a different level of appreciation. While the film offers immediate depiction of the characters, the novel however, with its scattered physical sketch, demanded my imagination.
I’m short on the attention and lazy in the mind. And if it wasn’t for the film, the main characters of the novel remain ghostly images in which I have little interest. Thankfully, the strength of Warm Bodies lies more than character features. The prose and plots are delectable, injected with enough earnestness and gravity to overshadow the absurdity of its premise. I learned to empathize with those subjected to this zombie plague. I felt the despair of the surviving humans, and felt sorry for the zombies.
The main protagonists ‘R’ and Julie are not innocent lovebirds in this zombiefied land. ‘R’ has killed, while Julie has a licentious past. Female romance writers can take a leaf out of Marions book that not all romance fiction has to have relatable, charming or ‘beautiful’ characters.
Warm Bodies is a mix of romance without the drama, in a human versus nature narrative so ambitious, only an awesome narrator can pull. Good job to Isaac Marion. And thanks for the movie.
