MISSIONARIES
By Phil Klay
“Success was a matter of perspective,” says one of the narrators in Phil Klay’s superb story collection “Redeployment” (2014). “In Iraq it had to be. There was no Omaha Beach, no Vicksburg Campaign, not even an Alamo to signal a clear defeat. The closest we’d come were those toppled Saddam statues.” Reminiscent of the hard-earned and spare-worded wisdom of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” the collection details the ways in which war has changed over the decades. Vietnam pops up as a source of ironic nostalgia, but the book is unwavering, even punishing, in its examination of modern warfare and the ethics of American intervention.
In “Missionaries,” Klay’s first novel, the same questions are taken a step further. Lisette, an American journalist as jaded as she is well-meaning, spends her time back from Afghanistan wondering where she should go next and eventually comes up with an idea: “any wars right now where we’re not losing.” Why, then, does she end up in Colombia? Doesn’t she know success is a matter of perspective?
Klay’s understanding of Colombia, the main theater of war in “Missionaries,” is the chief source of admiration for this reviewer. There are no simple wars, of course, but the Colombian conflict is as intricate as they come. In 2016, the country went to the polls to approve or reject a peace agreement, painstakingly negotiated over four years by representatives of the government and the Marxist-Leninist FARC guerrillas. It was yet another attempt at ending a 50-year war that had killed, wounded, displaced or traumatized around eight million people.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of October. See the full list. ]
Over the years, the agents of violence (as well as their motivations) had multiplied: Against the backdrop of the guerrillas’ atrocities, right-wing paramilitaries massacred entire villages, soldiers in the army murdered innocent civilians and called them enemy fighters to inflate body counts, and common criminals fought over control of the drug trade — which financed both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries and corrupted everyone, from law enforcement to congressmen. After the country sought U.S. aid in 1999, American military and technological assistance entered the landscape, and were still very much there in the months preceding the 2016 referendum. This is the all-too-real garden Klay has chosen for his imaginary toads.
“Missionaries” investigates the lives of four characters leading up to that critical year. Two Colombians and two Americans: Abel, a paramilitary foot soldier, victim and perpetrator of violence, trying to get a second chance at life; Juan Pablo, a lieutenant colonel in the Colombian Army to whom war has given a sense of purpose and also a measure of frustration; Mason, an American Special Forces liaison, once a medic in Afghanistan and a witness to multiple kinds of horror; and Lisette, the aforementioned journalist, whose ambiguities and deep-seated contradictions (her strange mixture of cynicism and naïveté, of curiosity and skepticism) make her, to my mind, the most interesting character in the book.
All four are damaged beings meeting in a damaged place; building a coherent novel out of such chaos-prone material requires order, structure, architecture. Klay is very disciplined, giving his characters regular turns at the microphone to tell their stories before having their paths cross in the novel’s version of hell: a small town in northern Colombia where all the forces of this particular war, including its politics, have come to clash.
A transformation comes halfway through the book, and the novel then feels like a different creature. After the Colombian Army kills a high-ranking drug dealer using U.S. technology and tactics, the town becomes a place “where the second- and third-order consequences of the use of force” come suddenly alive. To watch these machineries at work is one of the pleasures “Missionaries” offers: first the illusion of control, then its slow unraveling, and finally the unintended (and invisible, for most participants) costs of intervention in a society where violence is shape-shifting.
We leave behind the first-person narratives that read almost like a series of confessions, and we move to the third-person voice that dominates the rest of the novel. It is a risky decision, flirting at times with the diction and style of conventional thrillers. But what the novel loses in intimacy and introspectiveness, it makes up for in speed and breadth. It opens its arms to embrace a wider, richer take on the Colombian conflict, moving with ease from innocent students concerned with human rights to guerrilleras who have been raped to gang leaders vying for power.
Klay is fascinated by the diversity of human experience under extreme violence. “Violent people are boring people,” says a Colombian activist in the novel; if she’s right — and I’m not certain that she is — it is only because most violent people don’t enjoy the privilege of having their stories told by caring fiction writers. On the other hand, those who suffer and survive violence are infinitely interesting, and “Missionaries” is attentive to their internal mechanisms, their social context, their psychological scars, while conceding that their experience is to some degree incommunicable, that language has its limitations.
More than once, this concern rises to the novel’s surface. Lisette is conscious in Afghanistan that war is inseparable from its narrative, that it changes depending on the spin. Abel, the young Colombian militiaman, grapples with the words that would convey his experience being tortured with a rag soaked in gasoline and soap: “I could say, ‘Fire spread inside Abelito’s skull and lungs.’ I could say, ‘His nose and throat felt as though they were being burst open from inside.’ … But this is not helpful.” Mason, in his days as an American medic, hears a similar sentiment. “The sad thing about what we do,” his team sergeant tells him, “is that we go home to our wife and kids and know that we can never really explain this to them, what it’s like to do this job. That they’ll never understand.” Making us understand is, of course, one of fiction’s main tasks.
In an essay written in 1959, Gabriel García Márquez berates Colombian novelists for their obsessive depictions of the political massacres of the previous decade. They failed to realize, he writes, that the novel they were after “was not to be found in the dead, whose guts had been spilled, but in the living, who had to sweat ice in their hiding place, knowing that with every heartbeat they ran the risk of being gutted themselves.” Early in “Missionaries,” the rebellious mayor of a small town is tied to a piano and chainsawed in half by Abel’s paramilitary squad; later, Mason recalls tending to a wounded comrade, trying to close his abdomen to keep his entrails sterile. The novel, of course, is not about the mayor’s guts or the wounded soldier’s, but about Abel and Mason, scarred by what they have witnessed. What do you do with the horror you have seen? How do you use it to survive? Such questions inform some of the novel’s best pages.
“Missionaries” is a courageous book: It doesn’t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world of local politics, often including real names and events, never making any concessions to a reader’s potential impatience with all things foreign. It never simplifies; it doesn’t even try to streamline the situation. We do feel, however, Klay’s restlessness about how much information to give — and his preoccupation with the adequate tools to give it. This authorial anxiety occasionally leads to problematic narrative choices. In one eloquent moment, the reader will blink twice before accepting that a Colombian congresswoman, discussing Colombian criminal gangs with a Colombian military officer, would reach for this piece of pedagogy: “If the Urabeños are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then Jefferson and his Mil Jesúses are ISIS. You understand?” The analogy flies over the officer’s head and reaches the non-Colombian reader, for whose sole benefit it was spoken.
But these are minor flaws in a novel notable for its empathy and its curiosity (in the shape of voracious research), and for its cleareyed observation of war in the 21st century: this globalized war, carried out all over the world by migrant warriors. They can be interventionists or mercenaries, they can be idealists or cynics, but they fight, administer or narrate these wars with little command over one crucial fact: Violence poisons everything. It continues unabated in Colombia years after the peace agreement, which was rejected by voters after a divisive campaign full of lies and misinformation, then renegotiated and approved by Congress. The issue still polarizes the country.
Is there such a thing as a “good war,” like the one Mason seeks? “Missionaries” is skeptical at best; it does believe, however, in fiction’s ability to illuminate these dark places. And so the novel goes on, undeterred, exploring and revealing whole human worlds that would remain inaccessible without it.
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