ZONE ROUGE

Plunkett’s polyphonic novel details the lingering effects of war.

It’s a bold choice to begin a novel with the image of cows swallowing shrapnel, but it illustrates just how this book juxtaposes the martial and the quotidian. Large sections are narrated collectively by the démineurs, who are responsible for cleaning up ordnance from World War I in the fields around modern-day Verdun, France. “We recover dozens of shells every week. Every month: hundreds. Every year: tens of thousands,” they say—and gradually, Plunkett clarifies the physical and psychological effects of this work. One of the book’s narrative threads focuses on démineur Ferrand Martin, who is being treated for lymphoma that he almost certainly developed from exposure to military hardware: “Every shell we pull from this earth has a secret. Powder. Ball. Chlorine. Mustard. Arsenic.” The discovery of a bone among the ordnance provides another facet of the region’s history, as a number of outside experts are brought in to investigate the scene. The dead man’s identity, and the question of whether he fought on the French or German side of the conflict, both complicate matters further. Certain subplots feel slightly underdeveloped, including some interludes with the town’s trysting mayor, but the sections narrated in the first person plural give a powerful sense of the weight of the work carried out to reverse the damage done to the local landscape a century ago. This is a book that ably balances philosophical musings with passages describing life in an ailing body, and the way that it evokes the effects of war long after the last shots were fired is deeply felt.

An unconventional exploration of the aftereffects of war.