Harare Review of Books

250 pp. September 2, 2025, Unnamed Press. Fiction.

---

War is futile. Why on earth do we keep doing it? It’s the one thing that reminds me that human progress is not the linear thing of Western imagination but rather something closer to the circles and spirals of African cosmologies. And then the worst thing, which is what this book is about, is the aftermath: all the stuff we leave behind in the earth, the unexploded ordnance poisoning the land—in Zone Rouge, the aftermath of the First World War in Verdun, France. The endless work of the démineurs there. The futile-feeling work of generations.

Zone Rouge has wonderfully memorable characters: Ferrand, one of these modern-day Sisyphuses, until he collapses on the job; Hugo, the rather smarmy mayor and philandering man who takes an oddly earnest interest in Hugo’s welfare; the Greek chorus of the démineurs, wearied by their thankless task but determined to do as much as they can, and who knows when the work itself may take them out; and then the land, the many, many little hills of Verdun, stripped of normal life and full of bones and bombs. Ferrand is the wonderful hero of the novel, an ordinary man who has found his life’s purpose and is committed right to the end.

Although this is indeed a novel with a plot (things do happen to the characters), it’s a meditation on war, and a jeremiad. Wars don’t end when a ceasefire is declared, and the particular brutality and futility of the Battle of Verdun is at the centre of Zone Rouge.

What is it all for? Why are young lives wasted, the bones of unidentified young soldiers forgotten in the earth or piled up in ossuaries, an impossible number of them, so many that only some fraction is on view and the rest are in piles in the basement? The relatives of these young men never finding full closure? And for a hundred more years the land must continue to be cleared, remaining poisoned for perhaps hundreds more.

Zone Rouge is immersive and quietly but powerfully persuasive. Plunkett is extremely effective in making real the terrible tedium and toll of both the work of the démineurs, and also the war that made their task necessary. This is a brilliant and important book. Thank you to Unnamed Press for DRC access.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.