Missionaries

 

It’s 2016, and Colombia is about to hold a referendum on accepting a peace treaty that would end a longstanding conflict between the government and leftist FARC guerillas. Tensions run high as various groups –former guerillas, former rightwing paramilitaries, narco traffickers, poor coca growers, the military and its American advisors – jockey for power, sometimes forging surprising alliances along the way. Among those caught up in the intrigue are Abel, a repentant former paramilitary soldier turned shopkeeper, Juan Pablo, a calculating and increasingly frustrated Colombian army officer, Mason, a American combat medic turned Special Forces liaison, and Lisette, an American journalist seeking a new war to cover. A crime of opportunity links all of their fates.

When Phil Klay, a former Marine who served in Iraq, released his short story collection Redeployment in 2014, his frank depictions of military life earned him Tim O’Brien comparisons. That same unflinching lack of sentimentality can be found in his debut novel, but Missionaries is otherwise a very different beast, echoing Graham Greene’s Catholic-infused spy lit.

The novel’s structure is an odd hodgepodge of the personal and political. The first half fleshes out the backstories of the four leads in alternating chapters, and here Klay fleshes out memorable and believably compromised characters. A victim of violence for much of his youth, Abel is pitiable despite his hand in committing horrible crimes, and that sympathy is amplified when his former commander-turned-drug kingpin, Jefferson (a nightmarish embodiment of casual violence), won’t let him live in peace. Juan Pablo, a ruthless authoritarian pragmatist, sends his daughter to an esteemed liberal university, and the two seem to have genuine mutual respect despite the gulf between them. In search of a good war and a good story, respectively, Mason and Lissette are naïve and opportunistic, yet these qualities are tempered by their conscience and professional dedication, respectively. The book’s latter chapters ditch these character excavations for a point of view that floats more freely as the action picks up, hopping from the four leads to Louisa (a massacre survivor turned aid worker) to Jefferson to several others. It reflects the thorny interconnectedness of Colombia’s political reality, but it’s also a bit disorienting. Anyone without some cursory knowledge of the decades-long Colombian conflict will be at a loss here.

Toward the end of Missionaries, characters immersed in another conflict – this one in the Middle East – watch as advanced technology completely redefines what would have otherwise been a simple tribal war. Klay does not hesitate to confront America’s complicity in that, but he is no polemicist, preferring to probe moral dilemmas rather than wag a finger, and that spirit of inquiry keeps this otherwise dense book afloat.