About book At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991)
I never was able to shake the feeling that there was something missing in this novel. Maybe it was a soul or heart that it lacked? Hard to say because it was, at times, quite beautiful, and the ending was very well done, but I felt empty after I was done with the book.One of the biggest problems I had with the book was that the characters felt very thin. Even Moon, who was written as a 'complicated man' never jumped off of the page and no amount of discussion between Wolf and Andy at the end about his mysteriousness was going to change that. And Moon was probably the biggest issue I had here; he seemed just too damn convenient as a character. His Plains Indian background never felt like more than an excuse to talk about how bad the native peoples of the Americas have been treated and how poorly we ever understood their cultures. I would have been much more interested had the book been about his back story only.I did, however, like Wolf, though I have to admit to always imagining him in my mind as played by Tom Waits from the film. Still, he was the only real character in the book and I really felt for him. He really was a very lonely man who acted tough (and could be tough, too) but he loved the people he let in.Hazel would have been a great character, too but she was a serious missed opportunity. I could almost feel Matthiessen's hatred and judgment of a certain type of American mid-western Christian woman. She got off to a great start and seemed like she was going to be worth exploring, but she nearly ruined the entire book. The only thing I enjoyed her doing was when she hated her husband for being so good, for being so much like Jesus. That was a great thing for a missionary to say.As for everyone else: Martin was painfully dull and boring, Leslie was thinner than water, and while Andy had the most potential, she never went anywhere. Even Matthiessen just leaves her sitting at a table staring into nothing at the end. Uyuyu, I'll admit was rather good, but he wasn't used enough and Father Xantes was just never tied down to anything I felt was relevant beyond an allegory for the Catholic Church in this part of the world. The novel is well written and some passages are very beautiful - the opening scene of the airplane is stunning - but it never adds up to much more than a story that is supposed to be sad but just winds up being sort of flat. And it's a shame, too because there was a real opportunity to explore some very interesting ideas, but perhaps this is material only Joseph Conrad would have known what to do with. And this novel does feel very often as if Conrad is standing over Matthiessen as he wrote it - the subject matter, the rough men as outlaws, the (sometimes here) very beautiful language, though Matthiessen's language never reaches the same depth as Conrad; he's no master wordsmith, but rather just a good putter-togetherer-of-words. In the end I do not feel as if I learned anything insightful about Christian missionaries, about native Amazon Indians, about South American politics (the parallel story of Guzman reads like a bad Hollywood movie), nor about the larger issues of faith and acceptance. I felt like we never really left that plane in the beginning and we only ever saw glimpses through the jungle canopy.
Imagine my surprise as I groped through the aisle of the library, seemingly in the "M" section when I came upon several of Peters books in the fiction section. I thought he only wrote nonfiction. I picked this book of the three or so offerings and laid it on the stack I was accumulating for the weeks reading.As I began to read I immediately became sucked in and totally immersed in the story, the setting, the characters. It began to occur to me, about midway through, that this book reminds me of the countless books as a child I eased out of the library under the watchful nose of my Mom and read under the cover of my room, at night while the family slept but I could not. I would be totally immersed in the story, spellbound by the world out there I knew nothing about, fretted over the emotions and needs of adults that I could only hope to someday understand.Obscure books that no one else read, but were life changing for me.This was a good book, one I could not put down and turned the pages greedily. Mr. M's prose is astounding and tender. One line went like this...we found ourselves like butterflies pinned to the trays of our mortality....The characters were, each and every one, fascinating. Though the central character, Moon was someone that I wanted to overcome the hand life had dealt him and in the end perhaps he was the only one who had successfully been reborn, redeemed, saved.Fascinating book, lot of topics to give thought to such as forcing our idea of a Higher Power that is better, more redeeming than the "savages" idea of a higher power. Who exactly are the savages here? The love between Wolfie and Moon, a manly love, one of desire and two halves making a whole.A study of faith and loss. Everyone looses. Even Moon, who lost so much to end up in the god forsaken back waters of So America, somehow overcomes in the end. As does Andy, as does Martin, who ends his life work as a martyr killed by one of the converts.I'm certain there is much more to this parable, this warning, this deep story layered with subtle preaching and astonishing revelations.I will be searching out rather than stumbling upon more or Mr's books.
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What an overwhelming story - this novelist picks you up and turns you inside out. I would hesitate to criticize the sincerity of the Christian missionaries. From my Christian perspective I was intrigued by the verbal sword play between the "evangelicos" and the Catholic priest that the author meted out in various parts of the book, and I was reminded of the all too recent near-enmity between Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity. On a different level, Lewis Moon's American Indian character nags at one's conscience. Of the women, Hazel appears to be the more enigmatic, but by the end of the book the reader realizes that Andy is more disturbing, even, than Hazel. The descriptions of the rain forest ... "The clearing scarred a wall of jungle which could not be held in check; the green absorbed both fire and machete, flowing back across the tangle of ugly blackened stumps to close the wound. The huts fought off rank weeds and thick lianas which crept up from behind, and the interiors were infiltrated by pale tentacles, squalid liverwort and creeping fungi." The characters and the plot seem to match the fierceness of the jungle.
—Penny
I "read" the audio version of this book, which was well done, but a fairly dense book like this with a large cast of characters is hard to keep track of when tooling about town behind the wheel of my van. The plot follows several missionaries as they confront the natives, the political climate,and their own fears & biases in an unnamed South American country. Matthiessen crafts some incredible characters, especially Lewis Moon, an American Indian seeking himself while stuck in this tropical paradise and a missionary who is more interested in winning natives away from the Catholics than winning them for God. Although well written, I found the story confusing at times as it replayed the same scene from the viewpoint of several different characters. It also seemed to jump around a bit, but maybe it only seemed that way to me because I was too busy watching the traffic. I'd like to someday revisit this I book form so I could focus on it more. Overall, an interesting book!
—Tamara Dahling
Not Mr. Matthiessen's first novel, but his first commercially successful one, APIEFOTL (whew, even abbreviated that's a long title) could be viewed as the South American equivalent of the Native American despoliation. A fictional tribe of savages, the Niaruna, live in isolation and happiness in the Amazon basin, but bad things are in store for them. Dueling missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, compete to convert them to an unwanted Christianity, a despotic and brutal prefect of Oriente state longs to eradicate them, and two amoral soldiers of fortune, Wolfie and Moon, wash up in the primitive village which is the last outpost of civilization in this area with no money and nothing to do. Moon, however, is part Native American, and the main thrust of the story revolves around his interactions with the Niaruna. I found the book to be uneven. Mr. Matthiessen touches all the bases of this type of story: greed, religious hypocrisy, exploitation, and more. He has created an interesting civilization in the Niaruna, and a well-turned character in Moon. Most of the other characters, however, are less persuasive and this slows the story down in places. I also wasn't a fan of the probably Castaneda-inspired hallucination sequences. On balance, not bad, but if you're only going to read one Matthiessen book, it has to be Shadow Country.
—Al
