REVIEW : Missionaries / Phil Klay
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For as many books are continuously cranked out about on the subject of many, many aspects of warfare - past and present and presumably future - war doesn’t seem a particularly easy subject to write about. Modern warfare - Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, seemingly unending campaigns lacking in clear objectives or even recognizable enemies deluded by patriotic jingoism, late stage capitalism and the aggressive (and toxic) support of right-wing politicians - hasn’t made it any easier. Writing about war post-World War II is a like trying to capture smoke with your hands or measuring the depth of the ocean by squinting your eyes. The best work (think Phil Caputo or Hampton Sides or Sebastien Junger) picks a single concept, or strain of story amongst the infinite amount a writer can carve from a single moment in a single battle in a single campaign and invests in analyzing the concept of war from that singular perspective. Mining meaning and opinion and subtext from a very specific perspective, the narrow viewpoint becoming a funnel for bigger, meatier thinking. Phil Klay in his first novel Missionaries does very much the opposite, casting a net over two decades of fighting on a multitude of continents with a cast of characters that grows and grows and grow over roughly 400 pages. In what feels like an attempt to say everything about war and the consequences of it in single book, Klay, undoubtedly a talented writer, says almost nothing that hasn’t been said before.
Phil Klay was the author of Redeployment, a 2014 collection of short stories drawn from his time as a Marine that was rightfully lauded. The slim volume deftly captured the day-to-day of a Marine fighting in the Middle East, the emotional toll, the bonding, the highs and lows of military service in the modern age. Here was an author who had something to say and who wasted little space in doing so.
Missionaries on the other hand is a sprawling plod. This is not the Phil Klay of the efficient, moving short story, but rather the author unbound by a small page count. With no boundaries in place, Klay attempts to draw a bead on everything from the role of non-bias media in accounts of war to the United States military’s far-reaching, near colonial impact on the world to the damages wrought by war and more.
The book follows a slew of characters who span the spectrum of the military experience - a reporter, a Colombian colonel, a Marine medic turned ambassador, a paramilitary fighter gone straight, etc. - from Afghanistan to Colombia as they are become entrenched in two wars gone off the rails. There’s so much plot, so many interactions pushed together in the first half of the book just to get the characters and their motives roughly aligned and in the same hemisphere, the meat of the story - the multi-faceted cultural war bloodying the nose of Colombia - almost feels tacked on. The two halves awkwardly sewn together into, a blandly plotted war book involving an inconsistent selection of archetypes loosely huddled around several handfuls of disparate ideas. Even worse: they aren’t original ideas or even particularly enlightening thoughts on stale ones. A reader walks away from Missionaries with the most cliche war trope of all - there are no bad guys in war, only shifting perspectives.
Which really is too bad as Klay’s talent in succinctly commenting on the larger themes of war do appear on occasion out of the deluge of everything else. About the impact of war on the individual: “It seemed he had split in two, and there was one Abel who was the grounds of his old village, doing the things he was supposed to do, and another Abel, watching, wondering what they were thinking that he was thinking…” On war’s ability to make us see just how small everything is: “That the world itself is what is small. Mountains, stars, horizon, so much accumulation of rocks, dust, and an expanse of empty air. Meaningless without someone there to see it.” Klay dots his pondering war opus with these razor sharp, lyrical jabs but they are few and far between in a yawning landscape of meandering narrative.
If you squint you can see the idea of the “missionary” threaded through the foundation of the book. It is a story of characters going to new places with the hopes of making an impression either with the existing culture or because of it. Though this thread of thought is what Klay tries to force the book around, the most interesting through line is the idea that large structures - armies, governments, media - slowly grind forward, leaving nothing unscathed but that these large structures pivot on the very small, very human whims of the individual. Every character in this book is looking out for them and theirs but their small, selfish actions change the course of entire countries. It’s a powerful idea but it is lost in Klay’s laborious, and often times cliched attempts to try and say so damn much.
I am an optimistic reader and when I find myself deep into a book that just doesn’t work I really, really want it to be my own lack of comprehension. And there’s a part of me that wants to think Klay’s shotgun approach is purposeful, that Missionaries isn’t actually a book about war, it’s a book about people and their messy interactions and how a simple cellphone photo taken in a fit of emotion can change the path of a country. It is about war, but really it’s just about emotions - big and petty - and nothing is less predictable or more powerful. But that’s optimism and realistically, Klay’s first swing at a novel is messy and overwrought, and I can’t believe any of it is intentional.
Missionaries by Phil Klay is out now from Penguin Press.
J.R. Kirk writes about books when he isn’t reading them.
