ZONE ROUGE, a novel fictionalizing a reality most of us haven't realized exists

ZONE ROUGE
MICHAEL JEROME PLUNKETT
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: We are démineurs. We dismantle bombs.

Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs spend their days in the ruined fields of Zone Rouge on the periphery of Verdun, France where they clean up the artillery and explosives used in World War I. One bullet, one bit of shrapnel, one bomb at a time. The work, they say, is not measured in days, months, or years, but in generations. It’s taken a century to get this far, and it will take many more centuries to complete.

One morning, a routine call to pick up a half-buried artillery shell turns out to be much more than just a single they discover a human skeleton, fully intact. Ferrand and his fellow démineurs dig deep into poisoned soil to reveal the past is rarely ever distant from the present.

This startling discovery kicks off a series of events that sees the usually desolate Zone Rouge teem with activity as academics, politicians, and locals all wrangle over the legacy of the War and what it means to remember. Zone Rouge is a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our modern anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The real Red Zone, northeastern France, is still...107 years after the Armistice on 11/11/18...unavailable for human habitation, so damaged by and so dangerous from munitions and chemicals used during the battles of the day that it is still polluting the soil, the air, the water...there are areas where arsenic makes up 18% of the soil by weight in the 21st century.

The devastation has led to the abandonment of the area as a productive landscape. The démineurs ...this is a real job, there are hundreds of these men working the "Iron Harvest" from both the 20th century's great wars...have greater risks for some cancers, greater risk, obviously, of fatal accidents as is expected for those working with unexploded ordnance.

An expansion of the myth of Sisyphus, a kind of riposte to the great classic All Quiet on the Western Front, the idea of the story is the unending price paid for war. As long as most of us have never heard of le Zone Rouge, which..be honest...you hadn't before now, the consequences of stupid people wielding too much power are kept out of sight-out of mind. So reading the quotidian struggles of those who, for the sake of a job, clean up their grandparents' and great-grands' messes. To their own occasionally lethal detriment.

No matter the side, no matter the divide, no matter the outcome, the planet we depend on for our existence and are highly unlikely to stop needing for that suffers fro our greed and fecklessness. In the end we will pay for our actions, are beginning to pay for our actions even now. The author is (per his Goodreads bio) a former member of the "...Marine Corps and is a former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. His writing has appeared in Wrath-Bearing Tree, The War Horse, Leatherneck Magazine, and other publications." With that CV, one can see why this is the subject he chose for his debut novel. A laser focus on the tangible costs of war has clearly guided the gentleman's course in adulthood. The reason the book is easy to read is in his ability to see the men, the actual uniform-wearing people, in the story. It gives the story its immediacy. The weakest part of this narrative is the man who runs a town in the Zone Rouge, who dreams of rebuilding it (in his own image of it, of course) in spite of hurdles both practical...aresenic-poisoned soil and unexploded ordnance do not say "bring the family to live here!"...and bureaucratic. The French government does not want the terrible optics of dead kids who played with a mine to go viral, nor does the rewilding of the areas most impacted strike them as a bad thing. Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, is undergoing this process as well, and it's definitely having an impact on the natural world that the disaster seemed to preclude. We as a species need to learn from these terrible events, learn how best to fix the carnage we've wrought on the planet's other inhabitants. The reason Hugo, the "mayor," doesn't come off well is he is an archetype of end-stage capitalism's obscene valorization of greed, selfishness, and self-interest.

As I suspect that was the author's intent, I take no exception to Hugo's horribleness. I take mild exception to Ferrand, our main character's, Boy-Scouty, libertarian ways. That's a fast way to enable fascism's rise, as we're seeing now...so no, no fifth star on this story.

That does not mean I was not very pleased to read this book. I was engaged throughout, I was educated by the story's reason for existing...I'm one who hadn't clocked the existence of the titular zone...and I thoroughly appreciated the author's deftness at refining and re-presenting Sisyphus for this climate-changing, cleaning-up century.