One of President Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year“Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn’t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New York Times Book Review“A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . … of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the ‘rational insanity’ of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.” —The Wall Street Journal
The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord’s safe house on the Venezuelan border. They’re watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America’s long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans’ presence and navigating a viper’s nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable.
Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.
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If Redeployment was about what happened when we ship wars abroad, then Missionaries is what happens when war comes roaring right back. Expansive, explosive, and epic.
Fiction that makes you feel a reality.
This review will differ from all others I’ve written. It is a sobering and serious book. This review will be lengthy and heavy and may feel a tad disjointed as different aspects are cut off and reappear. Quotes picked out to give an overview and idea.
Rarely (read: never) do I sit down with both a book and an open notebook and take notes at the ends of chapters for a review. This book? It demands it – compels it. While fiction, it tells an entirely read story, and one that those of us who dare to read, will never forget. It’ll be burned on our souls, forever coloring the lens we look at the world through. Tragic. Brilliant. Necessary.
(Pt.1)
This story starts out with a simple and direct storytelling- while it is at once both clear and concise and also from a child’s point of view. Masterfully done. A heavy tale. (1Abel)
Relativity. What is safety? No War? No bombs? What is it like to live in an area where safety is measured in the time between bombs and how many each kill? Not in wartime, but after the soldiers have left. The reporting calculated. The spins memorized and based on nationality and location. Cut and dried. Human loss boiled won to a political formula and fed to the masses.
“The key is finding a detail that might make someone, some reader looking over the morning paper, drinking coffee, eating a hard-boiled egg, about to rush to work, to make that person stop, and care. It’s difficult, in part because these days I find it hard to get those details to even make me care. When I first came here, I was full of rage at the indifference most people back home showed to the deaths of Afghans. All these human beings, suffering, dying, and fighting with unbelievable courage to live in this brutal country, courage that can inspire you for at least a few years. It’s a feeling I doubt I’ll ever get back. These days the thought will sometimes run through my head as I lie in bed, trying to sleep: I am broken, I am broken, and I don’t know how I will ever fix this hole I’ve carved into my soul.” (2Liz)
Pain. The moment that defines. The before and the after. Like two different people exist on either side of that boundary line. One self burned away and another borne of the ashes. (3Abel)
“Nobody ever asks a homicide detective if they’re going to end murder. The question isn’t whether we can win. It’s whether it’ll be worse if we stop fighting.” (4Liz)
Easier to forget than to remember. Reinvent yourself. Out of pain a grab for power which dull that which used to be life. Family. The depths of depravity from one side, from the other, hope and provision. (5Abel)
On the other side of the world, life goes on as it always has: health issues, towns growing, sharing breakfast… The only glimpses from the other side are watered down and nixxed by the editors. Tales that have been gleaned from risked lives on the chance that maybe someone back home will be brave enough to share the harsh realities rather than burying their heads in the sand, and therefore, those of an entire country’s. (6Liz)
Nightmares are no longer dreams but the realities of life throughout your days. (7Abel)
(Pt.2)
“A soldier’s job isn’t a kill, but to protect life. It’s just that he protects life by killing.” @wat do you do when it goes wrong? When your soulmate at home can sense it but you’re stuck in the silence of shame. “Stepping over a single corpse is painful, but walking over a pile of corpses doesn’t bother you at all….You don’t think of the bad guys having children. You think of them having torture houses and hacksaws and stashes of porn, not daughters. Please God, I prayed, no more kids….that feeling, that sense of yourself and your own mortality and that of the men around you–it lends an aura of the sacred to the profane work to come.“ Grief, wickedness, normalcy in the midst of war. A life split between two (and more) realities. (1Mason)
“In the military, in our military, we don’t have friends….we don’t even have the love or respect of our people….Instead of love or resources or friends, we have duty. It’s an iron duty, a duty that doesn’t beckon us to glory or to public adulation, a duty whose voice is sometimes so faint, a calling from some other sphere.” No war has only one side, or even two sides. So many people come from so many angles. What do you do when there are no good options? Do you find a moral compass from somewhere (religion, politics, employment) and choose the lesser of two evils? Do you march on as a robot only acting direct orders and not turning your eyes to the right or to the left? “If we’d used the helicopters for a mission like that, the US would have taken our helicopters back. So we all sat and listened over the radio [for 27 hours] as fourteen of the bravest police officers in Colombia slowly lost hope, and then we let them die.” (2Juan)
“You need a functioning army before you can have a functioning state.” (2Juan)
“Men are weak. Don’t ask if they’re good or bad. We’re all sinful. Ask if they’re better or worse than the times they lived in.” (2Juan)
“Safety teaches a weaker sort of will….If her generation were ever so safe that they could look on mine with disgust, that would only mean that my life’s work had been successful.” (2Juan)
“Carlos seemed certain he was going to die….Even if he survived the Golden Hour, I knew something he’d soon learn—that you never fully shake the finger of death once you’d be injured like this. Survivors age faster—two to four times as fast, though doctors don’t quite know why. The diseases of old age—coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, diabetes—strike earlier. It’s like the body knows it wasn’t meant to live.” (7Mason)
Brutal and tender, wide ranging and written with a clever focus. I swallowed Missionaries in two rewarding, if sometimes uncomfortable, sittings. I’ve not had experiences in war, although I have lived through terror, and Klay’s understanding and skill at translating real dread and death stakes into fiction left me rapt, even when I wanted to look away, I couldn’t. This book is ugly and beautiful and I won’t soon forget it.
Klay’s brilliant storytelling matches his subject, which is my favorite to read: Duty vs desire, family vs country, wrapped in obligation or driven for no relatable reason. And in the midst, with his deep cast of well drawn characters, he makes a case that war is unjust, the pursuit of war the opposite of humanity.
What happens when a novel becomes more than a novel? It becomes a prophecy. Phil Klay has written a prophecy.
Phil Klay’s Missionaries is a big, rich, clear-eyed book about death and life; wise, compassionate, and, yes, as cynical as it needs to be when necessary, but full of vivid people caught up in that organized human violence which is our species’ haunting passion. I’ve maybe never read a war novel this good.
Phil Klay’s Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven’t been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart and farseeing, and utterly unsparing. Extraordinary.
Shook me to my core. Klay takes the reader into the heart of Colombian darkness; the abuses of power, the forgotten lives of girls and women and how quickly human dignity — and conscience — get eroded in extreme times. This is audacious, heartbreaking, epic fiction.
Missionaries is an urgent, detailed, compassionate and quietly furious novel about America and her Forever Wars. Intensely readable, exciting, funny and heartbreaking — it will change you.
Phil Klay’s work has the large canvas, bitter clarity, and wild imagination of the great Robert Stone. With Missionaries he more than fulfills the immense promise of Redeployment.