Not all wars end the day peace is declared. In Claire Deya’s nov­el Blast, trans­lat­ed from the French by Adri­ana Hunter, this imme­di­ate­ly becomes clear. Blast takes place in Spring 1945 on the south­ern coast of France as World War II is near­ing its end. The char­ac­ters not only car­ry the psy­cho­log­i­cal bur­dens of per­son­al trau­ma and guilt; they are also tasked with the still-dan­ger­ous cleanup after the fight­ing is over. The nov­el focus­es on dem­iners, men who vol­un­teer or, in the case of Ger­man pris­on­ers of war, are coaxed and coerced into remov­ing the land­mines placed through­out the beach­es, roads, and towns of south­ern France by the Ger­man, French, and Allied forces. 

Clear­ing land­mines is tense, frus­trat­ing, and dan­ger­ous, and the men who work at it are there for var­ied rea­sons. Fabi­en, the lead dem­iner, is a for­mer Resis­tance fight­er. Vin­cent escaped from a Ger­man prison camp and is look­ing for Ari­ane, his lost love. Lukas, a Ger­man pris­on­er of war, seeks to escape his impris­on­ment. To Fabi­en dem­i­ning is an ongo­ing form of resis­tance but also a form of abso­lu­tion. ​“Because every­one felt guilty: for betray­ing, lying, steal­ing, aban­don­ing, not mea­sur­ing up, not join­ing the Resis­tance — or join­ing only at the last minute — for killing a man, or sev­er­al, for sur­viv­ing when so many friends had fall­en.” While Vin­cent is obses­sive­ly search­ing for Ari­ane, he befriends a young Jew­ish woman, Sask­ia, who is a Holo­caust sur­vivor. Sask­ia has her own quests — to regain her fam­i­ly home and to dis­cov­er who denounced her fam­i­ly to the Nazis. As time pass­es, her search becomes linked to Vincent’s.

Deya has based her nov­el on care­ful research, and the details of the mines and their removal are fas­ci­nat­ing. Hor­ri­fy­ing­ly lethal are the mon­strous 1400-kilo­gram sar­coph­a­gus mines, and the S.35 (known to the Amer­i­cans as the Bounc­ing Bet­ty) which, when trig­gered, flies into the air and spray steel beads to cre­ate a max­i­mum of dam­age. Each requires a dif­fer­ent method to be safe­ly defused or destroyed. 

The painstak­ing job of clear­ing mines from a beach, of sift­ing sand square by square, prob­ing for hid­den explo­sives so that life can go on after war is a fit­ting metaphor for the chal­lenges these wound­ed char­ac­ters face. As Vin­cent mus­es: ​“He would have liked his life and his options to have been cleaned in the same way [as the sand], and for the long threads of his mem­o­ries to glide through his spread fin­gers in a won­der­ful, uncom­pli­cat­ed caress. If only it were pos­si­ble to cleanse the past, to remove all its traps, and dis­arm all its igni­tors wait­ing to explode.”

But the past can nev­er be cleansed. Deya’s char­ac­ters have been changed by the war and their trau­ma can­not be eas­i­ly dis­card­ed. At the novel’s end, the sur­vivors some­how find the strength to rebuild as the almond trees bloom along the Mediter­ranean coast. Blast reminds its read­ers of the grim his­to­ry that lies beneath the flow­ers, the vivid blue ocean, and the sandy beach­es of the Côte d’Azur.