Writing a few years after the armistice that, at 11 o’clock on November 11, 1918, brought a halt to the fighting on the Western Front, John Buchan related how:

At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African Brigade, which represented the easternmost point reached by the British armies, a German machine gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.

After that, peace descended on the long battlefield. A new era had come and the old world had passed away.

But cataclysms rarely end so elegantly. More of the old world lingers on into the new than is often presumed.

The Invisible Land, the final novel by the French author Hubert Mingarelli (he died in January 2020), first appeared in France (as La Terre Invisible) in 2019 and, translated into English by Sam Taylor, was published in the United Kingdom the following year.1This strange, unsettling work, which is in some respect the third of a Mingarelli trilogy on war—each novel written with graceful precision, each understated, and each of which repays a