When Iraq War veteran Phil Klay's debut short story collection, Redeployment, won the National Book Award in 2014, it was clear that a talented new writer had appeared on the literary scene. The promise revealed in that work now is fulfilled in his first novel, Missionaries, a dark and complex story of the U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts most of America's citizens know, and often care, little about.
Missionaries focuses on the lives of four central characters--Abel, a young Colombian who enters the shadowy world of a paramilitary group after his village is destroyed by guerrilla forces; Mason Baumer, a Special Forces medic serving in Afghanistan; Juan Pablo Pulido, a lieutenant colonel in the Colombian army; and Lisette Marigny, an American journalist based in Kabul.
After a series of sections that range in time and territory from Colombia in the mid-1980s to Afghanistan in 2015--narrated by each member of this quartet in the first person--the novel shifts to a third-person point of view for its second half, as the lives of these characters intersect in the war-ravaged South American nation. That impoverished country is on the eve of a 2016 plebiscite to ratify a peace agreement between the FARC guerrilla group and the Colombian government, intended to end more than half a century of conflict. Mason serves as a Special Forces liaison to the government, where he supports the efforts of Colombians like Juan Pablo to subdue the violence among groups of guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers. Lisette, weary of the Afghan conflict, finds her way to the country in search of a new story, while Abel is torn between his fear of breaking with his paramilitary past and his desire to start a new life, free of his violent heritage.
Even as he delivers a tightly controlled, propulsive story of shifting loyalties and outright betrayal, one that at times features graphically described violence, Klay digs deeply into the minds and motivations of these characters. He reveals how, though their paths to engagement in a world of never-ending conflict may have differed, they all find themselves unable to escape its pull. Readers looking for moral clarity in the experience of characters enmeshed in what Lisette thinks of as the "systems applying violence across the globe" won't find it here, as Klay scrupulously avoids assigning praise or blame to anyone residing in this ethically ambiguous universe.
In its mood and subject matter, Missionaries bears a kinship to novels from the '70s and '80s like Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise and Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer. Phil Klay impressively updates the themes of those classic novels for our time, where "clean wars with clear boundaries" no longer exist. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Phil Klay's highly anticipated debut novel explores the world of four characters embroiled in two of the world's contemporary shadow conflicts.