Phil Klay’s new novel is a sobering look at America’s wars
War, like cancer, is a friend to the short story writer. It allows the heat under a life to be turned up quickly. In his first book, the story collection “Redeployment,” which won a National Book Award in 2014, Phil Klay dispensed that heat wisely. The book was about soldiers and veterans who served in the Iraq War, as Klay did. Those stories contained deep feeling but were nimble. They displayed an alacrity of mind and arrived like armored tanks.
“Missionaries,” Klay’s jumbosize first novel, is a different sort of ride. It’s more like a freight hauler, one that weighs 12 tons and has 10 wheels on the ground. It has many slowly grinding parts. It gets the job done, just about, but it’s a ponderous journey.
“Missionaries” is set largely in close- to- present- day Colombia, in the world of narco gangs and of the government and military agencies who pursue them. It’s got a lot of primary characters. It’s got a story that skips around in time, so there’s a moral Doppler effect to factor in. The reader needs to leave a trail of stones so as not to get lost.
One of Klay’s points is that it’s hard to tell good guys from bad in the drug wars. The poacher can become the game warden overnight, and vice versa. It’s a morally compromised universe.
It’s a swirling universe, too. This novel introduces us to cocaleros and guerrillas and paracos and narcos and bandits and police and soldiers, and shuffles them. One character frets that “there were different types of guerrilla, and different type of paracos, and different types of narcos.” One needs a sharp pencil, a deep intake of breath and a willingness to follow the author closely. On occasion I lacked at least two of the three.
“Missionaries” follows four essential characters, though the supporting cast is deep. There’s Abel, a former rightwing paramilitary who tries to escape that life. There’s Mason, a seasoned Special Forces medic who has served in the Middle East.
There’s Lisette, an American war correspondent who leaves Afghanistan to find a better war, and better stories, in Colombia. And there’s Juan Pablo, a lieutenant colonel in the Colombia military who dabbles in politics, knows his way around a good cigar and has a curious daughter who may discover things about his past he doesn’t want her to know.
Each understands this: Principles create desperate problems for people who try to live up to them.
Klay takes a sober, aerial view of America’s recent warmaking. One way into this world is with a joke the author relates. I’ll condense it this way: Knock, knock. Who’s there? 9/ 11. 9/ 11 who? ( Bitterly) You said you’d never forget!
Klay is interested in the machinations of post- 9/ 11 American power. Lisette compares Colombia to Iraq and Afghanistan. “This was an extension of the same war,” she thinks, “not the endless war on ‘ terror’ but something vaguer, harder to pin down and related to the demands of America’s not- quite- empire, which was always projecting military power across the globe and just shifting the rationale of why.”
There are many thoughts of this sort in “Missionaries.”
The author has done his homework and sticks pushpins into a large map. Yet this novel works, when it does, when it flies lower to the ground. Its flashes of genius and beauty are entirely in its details, not in foreign policy punditry.
Klay is brilliant on things like what it’s like to walk through a city after a recent bombing. He is very fine on what he calls the soundtrack of war: “the rasp of the Velcro on magazine pouches opening, the crunch of dried mud yielding to the massive tires of heavy armored vehicles, the cough of a diesel engine, the roar of a passing Chinook, the excited shouts from a nearby soccer field, the chirping of birds.”
He understands both the technology of war and the wet stuff of brutality and torture. He’s dryly funny about the new realities of American journalism and foreign reporting, where online “there’s no page A26 to flip past, because people don’t accidentally get reported facts on the way to the opinion page anymore.”
Klay’s writing about tending to the wounded is electric in its exactness. “I didn’t like the blood flow,” Mason says. “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. I looked at Carlos’ face, which was pale, serene. I compressed the aorta manually.”
These excellencies are small moments tucked into a baggy novel that struggles to find its focus. It’s not the author’s fault that the culture is saturated with prestige dramas (“Narcos,” “El Chapo”) about the drug wars, and that Don Winslow recently wrapped up his masterly Cartel trilogy. But there’s a sense, while reading “Missionaries,” of moving over instead of transcending familiar ground.
Late in the novel, the major characters are cinched together when Lisette is kidnapped while reporting. The denouement is reasonably exciting, in a gung- ho sort of way.