I really enjoyed this gently sad tale of the destruction left behind after WW1. As the demineurs work endlessly to clear the area around Verdun of artillery and explosives left buried, the community still suffers the consequences of the pollution and desecration of their lands, and the local (unlikeable) mayor works to capitalize wheresoever he can. A human story unfolds as we follow Martin at the end of his career and his illness, but ultimately this story resonates with the echoes of long spent conflict.

Zone Rouge by Michael Jerome Plunkett is a stark and evocative meditation on the haunting legacy of war. Set in the contaminated battlefields of Verdun, the novel follows Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs—men tasked with defusing the unexploded ordnance still buried beneath French soil over a century after World War I.

Plunkett’s prose is quiet yet powerful, much like the landscape he depicts: scarred, silenced, and poisoned, but never truly at rest. The discovery of a perfectly preserved skeleton deep in the zone serves as the novel’s chilling axis, reminding readers that history does not die—it waits. Through Ferrand’s weary gaze and failing body, the novel explores themes of memory, futility, ecological ruin, and the Sisyphean weight of inherited violence.

What makes Zone Rouge so compelling isn’t just its historical setting, but its philosophical undercurrent—the sense that the ground beneath us holds more than earth. It's a novel of buried grief and the ghosts of a century, told with restraint, precision, and poetic depth.

A profound and timely work for readers who value literary fiction with historical and existential weight.

The novel follows various characters involved in the clean-up of the Zone Rouge, an area in France contaminated by ordnance from WWI.

The book opens with a chapter told in the collective voice of the démineurs as they describe their work. A man uses a magnet to remove steel from the stomachs of his cattle. I thought this chapter was easily the strongest part of the novel. The voice it developed was really eerie and striking, and I was looking forward to more. However, the novel moves into a more conventional narrative, split between various characters.

Mostly, we follow the mayor and a single démineur, Martin, as the full skeleton of someone who may be a WWI soldier is discovered in the Zone. This discovery seems to be the focal point of the novel. However, I felt like the chapters became a series of alternating, loosely connected short-stories that were just about linked by this. I suppose the discovery of the skeleton and the subsequent attempts to identify it are meant to show an attempt to impose order on chaos. Having so many voices seems to be a way to depict life in teeming, expansive confusion, countered with the indifference and silence of death and history. To be honest, though, so many voices in a relatively short book makes the narrative feel undercooked at times. And they spend a lot of their chapters monologuing about the effects of war. So much so that at times I wondered if the author even trusted the reader to get the point. Less of that and more time spent in their actual lives would have been great.

The writing was far stronger during Martin’s chapters. Behind the first second-person chapter, these were my favourite. I think the novel would have been much stronger had it focused on him. I sensed that the author had a real affection for him, and this came through in the prose. His story feels resonant with what’s happening in the book and I would have liked to read more from him.

Overall, I found the themes of environmental destruction leaching into the lives of the people who live there, and the imbrication of history into the present, interesting. I just think the plot and characters needed a bit more weight.

While not exuding literariness exactly, I found the novel fascinating for its depiction of war ecologies. I recently attended a workshop on political ecology, where one presenter discussed the durational effects of "blasted landscapes" produced by war. Interestingly, the presenter discussed the war in Bosnia and its minefields. The novel's themes overlapped in an incredible feat of synchronicity. Furthermore, I learned that Bosnia actually exports demining knowledge, which resonates with the narrative. In terms of war ecologies, the novel effectively depicts the effects on not only humans, but also the non-human and more-than-human environments. The novel opens with a cow dying from eating too much shrapnel. There are also pertinent passages about trees and forests related to the more-than-human turn in the humanities. I certainly plan to return to the novel for a paper or two that I intend to write.