July 2022 Print

Review by William Gonch

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited pulls a fast one on its protagonist, its audience, and maybe even its author. Its narrator is Charles Ryder, an agnostic English boy raised by an emotionally distant father, who has been starved of art, culture, and human connection. At Oxford in the 1920s, Charles befriends Sebastian Flyte, the charismatic, troubled, and fantastically wealthy son of one of England’s great Catholic families. Sebastian introduces Charles to his family and, through them, to everything that Charles has been denied: history, emotional connection, the great European tradition of art and high culture, and the Catholic Church. Charles falls utterly in love—with the family, with Sebastian’s sister Julia, with the great English country seat of Brideshead Castle. Just as Waugh draws Charles into Sebastian’s orbit, he invites his readers into their world through the elegance and beauty of British aristocratic life between the world wars. The novel’s style reflects Waugh’s longing for the same world. He wrote Brideshead while recovering from an injury during World War II, indulging in its lush prose to escape from wartime drabness and scarcity.

By the novel’s end, the family is scattered, their cultural world has vanished, and Brideshead Castle has been turned into an army supply depot. The second world war and the characters’ own flaws destroy the world that Ryder, and many readers, found so appealing. But the characters find their salvation in and through destruction, and the novel’s theme is the quiet action of Grace drawing each character to a salvation that looks like worldly loss. Take, for instance, Charles and Julia: after numerous missteps, they finally enjoy a truly happy and fulfilling romance. The second half of the novel drives toward their marriage. But both are divorced, and Julia is Catholic. Charles wishes to marry her, but she realizes that to claim earthly happiness by marrying Charles would be to finally reject the God who loves her, and she refuses to do it. She does not, by making this rejection, become a holy woman. But she trusts that “if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, [God] won’t quite despair of me in the end.”

Julia’s rejection of Charles shows how Waugh tells two stories at once. The “outer story” is a catastrophe: Sebastian’s family is scattered and their cultured aristocratic world vanishes. The suffering caused by this catastrophe is real. But in the “inner story,” God’s Love saves the characters in and through that same catastrophe. The inner story transforms those same events into signs and means of Grace. Julia is not a saint, but she—and every other character who receives the inner-story treatment—is on her way to salvation.

Phil Klay’s recent novel Missionaries is very different from Brideshead—fast-paced and thrilling where Waugh’s novel is meditative. Klay writes about war, and his work is sometimes gruesomely violent, as befits its subject matter. Nevertheless, Klay is one of the best Catholic writers since Waugh’s death, and he is working in Waugh’s mode: here, too, an “outer” story attracts most of the attention, but an unnoticed “inner” story draws characters toward God. The title’s ambiguity refers to both stories. Its protagonists in the American and Colombian military are missionaries for order, freedom, and democracy, and ultimately their missions come to naught. But underneath we can see glimpses of a Divine grace pursuing these lost missionaries of a secular world order. In this way the title is reminiscent of the Gospel’s irony: when Roman soldiers mocked Christ with the crown of thorns, they did not realize they were crowning the true King.

Klay has a powerful gift for depicting war’s mixture of violence and normality. One soldier-character in Missionaries recounts a raid on an Iraqi insurgency leader by declaring, “Al-Zawba’i’s house was the nicest I ever raided. Not the wealthiest—we raided plenty of pimped-out palaces across Iraq—but it was classy. More books than I’ve ever seen in any house, American or Iraqi or otherwise. Some were in English. Mostly history books but also a worn old Huckleberry Finn. I won’t forget seeing that.” It is unsettling to think of U.S. special forces blasting down the door of a house full of books, unsettling also to think of Al-Zawba’i, an officer in Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus, as a cultured man of letters. A moment later there is another shock: an ungainly teenager charges down the room at the soldiers, and the captured ex-Ba’athist hurls himself in front of the boy, begging the soldiers not to hurt him. The boy is Al-Zawba’i’s son; he had been tortured by Shi’ite militiamen, and is now frail and unstable. You don’t think of Saddam’s henchmen having special-needs children.

Klay knows his subject: he served in the U.S. Marines from 2005-2009, including more than a year in Anbar Province, Iraq during the Surge. His first book, Redeployment, is a collection of stories about soldiers and veterans during the global war on terror; the book was widely praised and won the National Book Award in 2014. He has a gift for finding the poetry in military lingo and soldiers’ slang: an evening gathering is “zero dark and cold,” and a platoon has two Mormons, “the sober Mormon” and “the drunk Mormon.” There is a lot of profanity but none of it is gratuitous; it is an attempt to be faithful to the way that soldiers talk. Much more shocking than profanity is his soldiers’ blunt narration of the war’s strange moments. One story from Redeployment opens, “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.”

War attracts people, and Missionaries shows its attractions. In one scene, a soldier in the U.S. special forces reflects on the anticipation of combat, which gives his men a feeling that is part purpose, part connection with their buddies, and part adrenaline rush. “Before you hit a target,” he says, “there’s a sharpening to every second, eyes and ears tensed, the vibration of your heart beating, drumming through your chest. Your mind stays calm, detached, registering the fear, the excitement, the small movements of the men you’ve trained with, each in their positions, as trained and executed time after time so you don’t have to see but feel Diego, Ocho, Jason, and the rest… as part of a larger organism capable of covering every bloody angle of approach.” But when his “predator instincts” reach out to the enemy, there is a moment at which they change, taking on “the alertness of prey.” The soldier realizes that “the men you hunt are meat eaters too”—that the enemy experiences the same heightened awareness, that you and they are equals as you prepare for combat, which “lends an aura of the sacred to the profane work to come.” Most of the characters who volunteer for Klay’s front line are drawn to this “sacred” blend of adrenaline and meaning. For all its horror, war gives you something to love.

Missionaries paints on a wide canvas. The novel follows four storylines that begin far apart—in Pennsylvania; in Helmand Province, Afghanistan; in a small village in Colombia; and among Colombia’s military leadership. The stories converge during negotiations to end one of the world’s longest-running wars. The Colombian civil war began as a Communist insurgency in the 1960s; by the 2000s, it had devolved into a many-sided quagmire in which left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, private militias, and the Colombian state fought shifting battles against one another. By the 21st Century the war has lost its ideological coloring; right-wing and left-wing groups have become drug-smuggling operations. Nevertheless, their conflicts are as deadly as ever: it’s the Thirty Years’ War, but with cocaine.

The U.S. backs the Colombian state with money and military equipment in order to suppress the drug trade, and by the novel’s start it is putting pressure on the Colombians to conclude peace. The war and the peace process draw characters toward the war-ravaged town of La Vigia, where the fog of war leads them to a crisis that none of them expected. By following the convergence among characters who do not know one another, Klay transforms war itself into a character. The war follows its own logic, and decision-makers lack crucial information. For example, the crisis kicks off when Colombian guerrillas kidnap Lisette, an American journalist in her thirties. The American and Colombian militaries believe her kidnapping to be the work of Jefferson Lopez, a paramilitary leader who is the novel’s main villain. They decide to move against him.

But Jefferson wanted nothing to do with her kidnapping. Instead, through a series of misunderstandings, Colombian farmers in the region became convinced that Lisette was working with Jefferson. Some two-bit guerrillas have beef with Jefferson; they kidnap her to get back at him, and he sets out frantically to try to recover her to avoid becoming the target of the U.S. or Colombian military. Meanwhile, the militaries moving against Jefferson are fumbling in the dark.

In short, no one truly chooses the conflict between the military and Jefferson’s organization. It is initiated by accident and follows its own logic. In this way, the logic of war appears as a superhuman and inscrutable force, one in which human beings are caught up by accident or chance. By depicting soldiers within the grip of a system larger than any of them can understand, Klay invokes a literary tradition that you might call the “Vietnam Theory of War.” Novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) depict war, bureaucracy, and the state as inscrutable, impersonal forces that shape our lives but that sit beyond any individual’s direct control. Such novels are full of events like Lisette’s kidnapping, in which crucial, life-and-death decisions are made by people with no clear picture of what is going on. Often, too, they feature circular narrative structures: characters make choices and go on wild adventures but end up back where they started. The lack of progress or resolution asks readers, “What is the point of all this war?”

Klay’s account is different. For him, the “sacredness” of war gives dignity to its participants, but it can be a trap if it competes with the God Who is the true source of sacredness. Characters who make an idol of war can find themselves caught in the circle that Heller and Vonnegut imagined. One character, Juan Pablo, an officer in the Colombian military, embraces the war as a choice between sources of the sacred. He chooses the Colombian state over God repeatedly until he becomes an agnostic. He makes a god of Colombia’s attempts to bring order to the war-torn country but eventually loses faith even in that. He ends up working as a mercenary in Yemen, fighting alongside an international cadre of soldiers-for-hire. He has no ideological stake in the Yemeni war, but he aligns himself with modern warfighting as a form of “progress.” “It does not matter,” he decides, “if you stirred the passions of the people by demonizing the government or the capitalists or the Liberals or the Conservatives or the Catholics or the Protestants or the Muslims or the Jews.” He has seen the world as a conflict between high-tech, faceless “civilization” and “primitive,” specific human relationships, and chosen the former.

Unlike characters in Vonnegut or Heller, Juan Pablo chooses to make himself a cog in the machine of war. And Klay offers us an alternative, hidden story that makes even the logic of war into an opportunity for God’s Grace. Juan Pablo’s daughter Valencia plays a crucial role in the story’s climax and her actions, well-intentioned but foolish, cause the death of an innocent woman. When her father learns what she has done he is proud of his daughter, whatever the consequences, because she took “bold action” amid danger. Their conversation is painful because Juan Pablo praises her for actions of which she is ashamed. The scene ends with father and daughter looking out over the evening skyline of Bogotá, her father “pointing to the shifting colors over the mountains, over the white modern high-rise apartments, the old colonial buildings of the Candelaria.” Both see the same city, but while her father marvels at its beauty, Valencia looks at it as an exile, marked by her guilt.

Valencia set off toward La Vigia out of “simple faith” and a desire to do good, and she learns how complicated and broken the world is. But she learns something greater, too. At the end of their dinner her father takes her hand and “his love for her felt painful and cruel, and she wondered, if there was a God, if that was what His love actually felt like.” She has learned that she is a sinner and that if she is to know God’s love she will need to reach it through suffering. Don’t be deceived by the language, “if there was a God.” Although Valencia has not reached a mature faith, she, like Julia in Brideshead Revisited, is on the road to it. Unlike her father, earthly disappointment does not make her cynical, and she does not see suffering as something to be minimized through force. She sees it as the road to hope, and like Waugh, Klay leaves her as she takes the first step down that road.