Missionaries

A novel that will challenge your idea of war (October 2020).

Is there such a thing as a “good” war? Can wars be deemed successful, or is success in war clouded by ethics, political impact, and perspective?

Phil Klay’s novel Missionaries explores these questions extensively, primarily focusing on the Colombian civil war—an ongoing conflict which began in 1964 involving the guerillas, paramilitaries (paracos), narco traffickers, and the government of Colombia—and more broadly encompassing the worldwide United States Military system of counterterrorist warfare.

Missionaries is thorough and gripping, the well-developed product of six years of research. It follows Klay’s critically acclaimed and award-winning Redeployment (2014), inspired by his service in the Iraq War as a US Marine Corps, which set a high bar for Missionaries. Though I have not yet read Klay’s other work, I was impressed by both Missionaries’s depth and its ambitious stylistic choices.

Missionaries spans the mid-1980s to the near present, with the bulk of the action occurring in the mid-2010s. While most of its plot revolves around the war in Colombia, it also touches upon the wars between America and Iraq and America and Afghanistan. The novel is split into thirds, with the first two told from four individuals’ perspectives: two Colombians and two Americans. We begin with Abel, a victim of abuse and an ex-paramilitary fighter trying to reintegrate into society; next, Lisette, an American journalist who is at once jaded and determined; then, Mason, an American Special Forces Liaison and ex-medic; lastly, Juan Pablo, a conservative lieutenant colonel worried about both his left-leaning daughter and the 2016 Colombian Peace Treaty. Though all four have vastly different backstories, they all struggle with the war in one way or another, making for a powerful narrative. In the last third of the book, Klay abandons their individual voices, opting for a third-person voice as their stories cross paths in La Vigia, a small town in northern Colombia where all forces of the war come into play.

What I appreciated about Missionaries was that as much as it focused on the politics and realities of wars, it also focused on the resulting psychological effects—the aspects that don’t typically get attention in news stories detailing war zones. Klay sheds light on the internal struggles each character faces, fleshing out the narrators into real multidimensional people the reader can both sympathize with and reflect upon. We see Abel, for example, splitting himself into the person he was before the paramilitaries’ massacre of his town, and the person he became after. He reflects that “to talk about this part of my life is to talk about another person, like a person in a story, a boy with a father and mother and three sisters... Most people think that a person is whatever you see before you, walking around in bone and meat and blood, but that is an idiocy. Bone and meat and blood just exists, but to exist is not to live, and bone and meat and blood alone is not a person.” In another instance, we see Lisette—who in 2015 works as a special correspondent in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul—reflecting on how she has become desensitized to seeing Americans indifference to the suffering of the Afghan people: “I am broken, I am broken, and I do not know how I will ever fix this hole I’ve carved into my soul.” It is this in-depth characterization that made the book so engaging for me, even at times when I wasn’t sure where the individual stories were heading.

One warning I must give is for the explicit, detailed descriptions of violence in each character’s story, which I was originally shocked by but disturbingly found myself getting used to as the book progressed (which I now see could be a subtle nod to the sanitization of violence in the characters’ own lives). Though unsettling, I think the violence was important to the novel’s purpose.

Klay’s prose is steady, to the point, and well thought out. With each chapter, I was placed right in the middle of a character’s life, yet I never found myself struggling for footing and felt like I truly knew the characters by the end of the book.

One area where the book unfortunately fell short for me was the resolution, which I expected to be more satisfying than it was. Missionaries undertakes the ambitious task of coalescing a breadth of both narratives and topics. While the novel fared better with this than some others, the individual stories were never stitched together into a cohesive culmination, and I felt like I lost some of the characters’ perspectives in the last third of the book. Ultimately, Missionaries reads more like four individual stories than a novel—which is not to say there’s no value in that. But if you’re looking for a book with a satisfying close and a sense of coherence, you may be let down. Essentially, the book’s message does not lie in the plot, but rather in the characters’ reflection on it.

Regardless of its loose plot structure, if you’re looking for a thought-provoking and original read, I would still highly recommend Missionaries. It tackles the concept of war in a way I haven’t seen before, painting a clear picture of the complexities that challenge what it means to “win” or “lose” a war; in Colombia, we see the reality of a war involving guerillas, paramilitary, cocaine farmers, narco traffickers, police, government military, and American intervention. Missionaries left me with the powerful message that its protagonists grapple with: in complicated circumstances, even good intentions can have unintended consequences.