“We shot dogs,” began the first story of Phil Klay’s debut collection, Redeployment, which won the National Book Award in 2014. “Not by accident. We called it Operation Scooby.” Klay joined the Marines in 2005, fresh out of college, and served as an officer in Iraq’s Anbar province from 2007 to 2008. Since then, in addition to writing stories about warfare, Klay has produced a body of thoughtful nonfiction about how the United States wages war and how the public thinks or neglects to think about what its military does. Klay is conversant in the language of warfare — in its dialects, idealism, pragmatism, cynicism, and sheer jaded apathy. He is adept at big-picture thinking and at narrowing his focus to the chaos on the ground. You begin with a grand plan, perhaps a mostly honorable one. You end up shooting dogs. On purpose.
Though Klay’s debut novel, Missionaries, is set not in the Middle East but in Colombia, it interrogates the same dynamic: the tension between vision and reality, between good intentions and devastating consequences. That’s “interrogates” not in the grad school sense but in the “zip-tied to a chair” one. Missionaries is a graphically, at times tauntingly violent book. It rubs the warmonger’s bloody muzzle in the evil that his ideals conceal and the pacifist’s squeaky clean one in the evil that his ideals do nothing to mitigate. It dramatizes the ways in which trying to solve a problem can cause just as much unintended mayhem as leaving it to fester.
Missionaries isn’t, however, unrelievedly violent. It’s strange to say of a book in which a character gets tied to a piano and cut in half with a chainsaw that it is in many instances a quietly psychological production, but there you have it. One is reminded of what Graham Greene, a writer who would have admired Klay’s grasp of both political turmoil and man’s fallen nature, told an interviewer who suggested that his recent play privileged dialogue over action: “I confined myself to one set and I made my characters act, one upon the other. What other sort of action can you have?” By writing characters who act upon each other (often merely by conversing) rather than who stand in for this or that geopolitical cliche, Klay reveals why military interventions are so chaotic and unpredictable. Call it the human factor.
Klay confines himself to a handful of characters and alternates between their perspectives. There is Abel — Abelito, still a little boy when he’s introduced — whose life and soul are irrevocably damaged by the war between guerrillas, narcos, paramilitaries, and ordinary Colombians. Lisette is a journalist whose own version of “be careful what you wish for” is to pivot from Afghanistan to the “productive” or “winnable” conflict in Colombia. Mason, who served as a Special Forces medic in Afghanistan, is now working in what is euphemistically called an “advisory capacity” with the Colombian military. Juan Pablo is a Colombian military officer who must support (or perhaps babysit) this U.S. liaison while doing what he can to cultivate a fragile order in both his homeland and his family.
It’s to Klay’s credit that there’s no clear hero, no one character with whom the reader is invited to identify at the expense of the others, no innocent underdog, and no Jack Ryan, either. There is only a jungle of motivations and desires, some fruitfully entwined, some choking the life from each other. In violence-riven Colombia, power and powerlessness corrupt. Whether by greed, power, madness, fear, desperation, even love, everyone is compromised.
The plot of Missionaries traces Abel’s journey from “a boy with a father and mother and three sisters” to an orphan soldier in a terrorist militia; the bloody rise of his commander, Jefferson; and the disparate interests, foreign and domestic, converging on their territory. With drug cartels and political ideologues vying violently for power, Colombia’s factional violence provides the backdrop for a look at interference in remote conflicts. One careless action triggers an “incident,” to borrow the parlance of military understatement, with broad ramifications for the local balance of power. Klay ably illustrates how war — civil war, in this case — traps anyone it doesn’t kill outright, leaving them with impossible choices and psychologically crippling memories. And he shows how unpredictably or arbitrarily these dominoes may fall.
You’d need a map or a sand table to follow the big-picture action, but it’s the characters’ inner lives that truly propel this book. There is scarcely a single player in this conflict who isn’t constantly thinking of his family, of how the most trivial action might affect a loved one. The prose itself is varied to capture different types of crisis and catharsis: clipped and methodical in battle mode, it can reach a mandarin elegance in passages of description or reflection.
Violence, like sex, is challenging to write, but we find Klay at his best when he’s up to his wrists in gore. High-test battlefield action gives way to its result, catastrophic injury: “Packing from within is filling a cavity. Two layers of pads on either side of the liver, supported by the abdominal wall and diaphragm.” Watch closely: “I didn’t like the blood flow. I pulled the stomach down, pushed two fingers past it, slippery, rubbery until I could feel the aorta. It pulsed under my fingers. This is life, I thought.” In Colombia, there are rapes, corpses dissolved in acid, a woman nearly killed by men with hatchets, another beaten for one savage, nearly page-long sentence by her kidnappers. This, too, Missionaries insists, is life.
Klay’s achievement in Missionaries is to strike a sober, careful balance between the geopolitical and the personal. He shares with Joseph Conrad, an obvious lodestar, a command of the complexity and precariousness of an interconnected global order. He shares with Greene an awareness that global phenomena are inseparable from human beings, like Mason, who frets endlessly about being a “shitty father” and absent husband, or Pablo, with his well-founded anxieties about how his young daughter perceives his brutal work. There are souls at stake here. The terrible arc of Abel’s life, in particular, is as haunting as Lord Jim or The Power and the Glory as a portrait of disgrace in pursuit of redemption.
It’s a serious problem for contemporary literature that so few of our writers have directly experienced the ugliest side of life. Whole worlds of dangerous work and operatic tragedy are opaque to the reading public because the people who inhabit them too seldom choose to write about it. Missionaries is galvanic and affecting, its prose shifting from beautiful and graceful to hard-boiled as hell; above all, it bears the unmistakable stamp of having been written by someone who didn’t need a research assistant to get the bloody details right. That this hard-won knowledge is made to serve such superb, morally serious storytelling is reassuring. The bodies may pile up in Missionaries, but at least we have our proof that the novel is far from dead.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
