Readers of this blog will know that I am a Mathias Énard fan, having loved and reviewed three of his novels – Compass, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, and The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild. For some reason, I always felt daunted by Zone, but after having read three of his books, I felt ready to plunge into his most lauded novel.

Mathias Énard’s Zone is an ambitious, dense, and hypnotic tale of war, violence, and trauma that unfolds over a single train journey from Milan to Rome, where the protagonist, Francis Mirković, a former Croatian soldier turned low-level spy, reflects on his tumultuous and murky past.

“Everything is harder once you reach man’s estate…” So begins Zone, as Mirković boards a train in Milan clutching a suitcase of secrets, destined for Rome. His original plan to fly is derailed by a night of excess – booze and drugs leave him scrambling for the train instead. The suitcase he carries holds a trove of secret documents detailing decades of atrocities in the nebulous ‘Zone,’ along with the identities of its key players. Selling these to the Vatican is Mirković’s desperate, possibly treacherous gambit: a final act to sever ties with his old life, atone for his sins, and start anew. But can redemption truly be within his grasp?

The Zone, meanwhile, broadly refers to the Mediterranean and the Middle East regions, a hotbed of wars, political turmoil, and human atrocities committed over the course of the 20^th century. As the train snakes through the Italian countryside, Mirković, dulled by drugs, alcohol, and exhaustion, sifts through fragmented memories of his past: a harrowing, blood-soaked journey as a soldier and a spy in the conflict-ridden landscapes of the Balkans and beyond.

FRANCIS MIRKOVIĆ’S DUBIOUS PERSONAL HISTORY

Francis Mirković’s personal history is as dark as his professional one. We learn that his paternal grandfather, a Resistant, escapes the Gestapo by cracking under torture and denouncing his comrades, overcome by shame by this act, and finally relocating to Paris. The father, an engineer and a quiet man, commits atrocities himself in Algeria, well-versed in torture methods that his own father was subject to, a fact that Mirković learns after his death – “can my mother see them, does she know, of course, ‘he did what he had to do’, that’s her phrase, like mine ‘I did what had to be done’, for the homeland…” Meanwhile, Mirković’s maternal grandfather, was a Fascist, one of the first Ustashis we are told.

With such a chequered family history, Mirković as a young man becomes embroiled in the Balkan Wars, violent conflicts that erupted following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Fuelled by a distorted sense of nationalism (“you look like your grandfather, it was a trap, I fell into it just as a train plunges into the night I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps without knowing who he was…”), Mirković joins the Ustashi militia, committing atrocities that leave him scarred and disillusioned. The loss of his closest comrades – Andrija and Vlaho – intensifies his trauma, while the repressive silence surrounding his family and collective guilt exacerbates his emotional detachment, a trait that ultimately fractures his romantic yet fragile relationships with Marianne and later Stephanie, his colleague in the French intelligence.

…the incomprehension of people not at the front, the impossibility of telling about it, of speaking, like those children leaving school who don’t know how to say what they did all day…

After the war, Mirković tries to transition into a diplomatic career but that endeavor fails. Instead, given his wartime experience and contacts, he is recruited by the French Intelligence as a spy, operating in the shadows, and gathering information on the Zone, particularly the political landscape and developments, terrorist networks, and other shady dealings unfolding across the blurred boundaries of the Mediterranean and Middle East. But the world of espionage is also opaque and while it may have provided Mirković with a new purpose, it only further deepens his moral ambiguity as he learns to manipulate people, betray confidences, and navigate the murky waters of political intrigue.

..plunged into the Boulevard Mortier in the headquarters of darkness and secrecy, of strategic or trivial information, often you forget where you are, the job becomes routine, the investigations, the crosschecking, the files, the summaries, the reports, the correspondents, the secret agents, the middlemen, the friends, the enemies, the propaganda, the sources, the manipulation, the human or technological information, all that blends in with normality, with the everyday…

THE RELENTLESS HISTORY OF WAR AND VIOLENCE

One of the major themes explored in Zone is the unrelenting cycle of war and violence unfurling throughout history. Through Mirković’s chaotic reflections, Énard draws connections between ancient conflicts and contemporary ones, highlighting how the Mediterranean has always been a fertile ground for violence, conquest, and suffering, how history keeps repeating itself, how the horrors of past conflicts influence the present. By combining the personal (Mirković’s job, his family, friends, and relationships) with the political (chronicling larger historical conflicts and the political landscape of the 20^th century), Énard is interested in showing how individual lives are shaped – and often destroyed – by geopolitical forces that seem largely governed by ego, hate, violence, revenge, and profiteering.

Énard juxtaposes Mirković’s personal struggles with the sweeping tragedies of 20th-century history – the two World Wars, the rise of fascism, the industrial murders of the Holocaust, the Balkan Wars, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These events churn through Mirković’s mind like an endless, haunting reel, exposing humanity’s ugliest impulses: racism, greed, power struggles, and genocidal violence.

THE WEIGHT OF PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

Zone also dwells on themes of personal and collective trauma, individual guilt, and the need for redemption.

I regret I don’t know why I regret, you regret so many things in life memories that sometimes return burning, guilt regrets shame that are the weight of Western civilization…

With his opaque past and Nazi sympathies, Mirković emerges as a profoundly flawed and morally complex figure. On one hand, he is weighed down by the legacy of his family history; on the other, he carries a deep disillusionment from his time as a soldier in the Balkan Wars and his shadowy career as an intelligence agent. Mirković often returns in thought to his wartime comrades, Andrija and Vlaho – the former killed in action, the latter left disabled. The trio bears the scars of their harrowing experiences, but it is Andrija’s tragic and senseless death that leaves the deepest mark on Mirković, haunting him with a lingering sense of loss and futility.

Among his three relationships referenced here – Marianne, Stephanie, and Sashka – the reader gets a sense that his relationship with Stephanie held more promise. We learn how the two meet while being employed by the same Intelligence Agency, often travelling together on their jobs. But despite Mirković acknowledging the significance of this relationship, he can’t quite open up to her. Stephanie’s attempts to pierce his emotional defenses prove futile; his detachment becomes an insurmountable barrier, ultimately driving her away. Her disillusionment heightens when she glimpses the darker side of Mirković’s nature, witnessing his capacity for violence when she pointedly asks if he has ever killed a man.

A FAILED QUEST FOR REDEMPTION?

After having worked in intelligence for ten years, and tired and burdened by the weight of his morally dubious past, Mirković hopes to wipe the slate clean and begin life anew with a new identity. His trip to Rome is supposed to be the inflection point in his life; once he sells the suitcase full of documents to the Vatican and pockets the money, he can leave his old life behind restart afresh with his new love, Sashka. Somewhere, there’s a sense that Mirković is seeking redemption, but one that is unlikely to come to him given the role he has played, first as a soldier and then as a spy, in history’s seemingly never ending cycle of violence.

It is perhaps ironic that the identity Mirković chooses – Yvan Deroy – is possibly a stolen one, the real Yvan is a schizophrenic locked up in an asylum, a man who harboured a violent Fascist outlook himself. Ultimately, despite Mirković’s desperate attempt to atone for his past, the possibility of redemption could remain elusive in the face of his complicity and profound moral failure.

A STORY WITHIN A STORY

Zone also weaves in a separate narrative in the novel in the form of a story that Mirković reads on his train journey – the tale of Intissar, a Palestinian fighter, and her lover Marwan, killed by Israeli forces.

…there is nothing I desire more then than a novel, where the people are characters, a play of masks and desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the paragraphs, dialogues, adventures, strange worlds flow by, that’s what I should be doing now, going on with Rafael Kahla’s story, finding Intissar the Palestinian again and Marwan dead on a corner in Beirut, a journey within the journey, to ward off fatigue, thoughts, the shaky train, and memories…

Told across three chapters, this story-within-a-story highlights the trauma of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding another dimension to Énard’s broader examination of 20th-century violence. While stylistically distinct – these chapters employ straightforward prose and sentences with full stops – they underscore the recurring theme of collective suffering and Mirković’s desire for redemption.

…sometimes you come across books that resemble you, they open up your chest from chin to navel, stun you, I’d like to have Marwan’s nobility, is that still possible…

OTHER PEOPLE IN THE NOVEL – REAL, IMAGINED, LITERARY

Énard populates Zone with a rich tapestry of historical, fictional, and literary characters. Figures like Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who sparked World War I, and Francesc Boix, the Catalan photographer whose testimony at Nuremberg condemned Nazi war criminals, Millan-Astray, a major figure of Franco’s dictatorship as well as the slew of Holocaust perpetrators share the pages with fictional creations such as Mirković, his family, comrades, and lovers. Even literary icons are portrayed through a darker lens: Malcolm Lowry attempts to kill his wife, James Joyce harbors taboo feelings for his daughter, and William Burroughs engages in dangerous autoerotic acts.

WRITING STYLE – THE MUCH TALKED ABOUT 500-PAGE SINGLE SENTENCE

Brian Evenson, in his introduction likens Zone comprising 24 chapters to the 24 books of Homer’s The Iliad, a sort of modern epic in terms of the theme of war and violence depicted within its pages.

The novel’s defining feature is its narrative style (wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mandell) —a 500-page single sentence that mirrors the frenetic, fragmented nature of Mirković’s thoughts. While daunting at first, this stream-of-consciousness approach gains a rhythm, much like the train’s rocking motion, immersing readers in the chaotic interplay of trauma, history, and memory.

…there are so many things that divert you from the path, that lead you astray and alcohol is one of them it makes the wounds deeper when you find yourself alone in an immense freezing train station obsessed by a destination that is in front of you and behind you at the same time: but a train isn’t circular, it goes from one point to another whereas I am in orbit I gravitate like a chunk of rock…

And yet despite its density, the novel is never difficult to read – the prose is punctuated by commas, allowing for pauses that make the narrative navigable. Where the novel does get challenging is when it dwells on the horrific details of war crimes, particularly the grim details of the Holocaust, the genocidal machine carrying out murder with the precision of a business.

IN A NUTSHELL

Zone, then, is a brilliant, dizzying, bleak but compelling novel, an unflinching examination of war, memory, and guilt in which Énard depicts Mirković’s journey as a metaphor for Europe and the Middle East’s troubled 20th-century history, depicting uncomfortable truths about political ideologies, power struggles that fuel humanity’s darkest impulses. The novel’s relentlessness can sometimes feel overwhelming, but perhaps that is its purpose: to confront readers with the unending phases of violence that has defined history in the past and will most likely continue in the future.