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A red thread of violence runs through Mathias Énard’s novels. From the Balkan wars of Zone (2008) to the upheaval of the Arab Spring in Street of Thieves (2012) and a soldier fleeing the battlefield in The Deserters (2023), Énard has explored the conflicts that border the Mediterranean. He has generally been more concerned with conveying the specificities of place, culture and history than creating characters with complex inner lives and back stories. Énard is very good at creating rich, intricately connected tapestries of historical episodes. But his treatment of the individual psychology of warfare can sometimes be reductive. The sentiment expressed in Zone sums it up: “Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusions that they produce.”

His 2003 debut novel Perfecting the Shot , newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, seems to be the origin of this tendency.…