At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local commandant. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literature, Classics, Religion, Travel

373 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Peter Matthiessen is the author of more than thirty books and the only writer to win the National Book Award for both non-fiction (The Snow Leopard, in two categories, in 1979 and 1980) and fiction (Shadow Country, in 2008). A co-founder of The Paris Review and a world-renowned naturalist, explorer and activist, he died in April 2014.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a tale of high adventure, action and more action set in the Amazon Jungle.

And who better to tell this multilayered yarn than Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)? After all, he was not only an accomplished novelist but also a naturalist and worldwide explorer, author of, to list three, The Snow Leopard, African Silences and Cloud Forrest, the last being an account of his crisscrossing 20,000 miles of South American wilderness, dealing with tribespeople and bandits, all the while chronicling fauna and flora, the entire web of life he deeply revered. Also worth mentioning, Peter Matthiessen practiced Zen Buddhist meditation and later became a Zen priest.

Since our American author enjoyed nothing more than good old-fashioned storytelling complete with compelling, colorful characters (an opinion he shared some years ago when I attended one of his book readings in New York), other than mentioning much of the plot revolves around Protestant missionaries setting out to save souls for Christ, I'll let Peter Matthiessen do the telling and thus make an immediate shift to note the major players.

Martin and Hazel Quarrier along with son Billy arrive fresh from their missionary duties on behalf of American Indians (author's language) back in North Dakota. The Quarrier family will work under the direction of Leslie Huben, a fellow American missionary who's been living among the Amazonian Indians for a number of years. Although Leslie doesn't have any children, he does have a wife - beautiful Andy (in the film based on the novel, Daryl Hannah plays the part of Andy Huben).

The Quarriers quickly come in contact with four other individuals they must deal with, a quartet of men Peter Matthiessen portrays in vivid detail: Comandante Rufino Guzmán, political leader for this region, Father Xantes, Dominican Padre who has also been working with the Amazonian Indians, and two American soldiers of fortune/bandits on the run: scruffy, knife-wielding outcast Wolfie, and Luis Moon, a Cheyenne raised on an Indian reservation and winner of a college scholarship.

Casting the spotlight specifically on the missionaries, first we have Leslie Huben. "A former star in college basketball, he had been called from a lucrative job in the real-estate and insurance business to emulate St. Paul: "Be ye followers of me," he had told the Tiro Indians, "even as I also am of Christ." The moving event had been described in his first letter to Mission Fields the monthly publication of the New Fields Mission. He became a regular contributor, and his fervent accounts of the dark jungle won high praise. Soon he announced his intention of carrying the Word to the savage Niaruna."

Tall, blonde, tan and athletic, Leslie faces the world squarely, his arms akimbo, a man convinced he possesses the truth and his mission in life is to bring the truth to those in darkness. Seen from one angle, Leslie embodies the religious American frontier spirit, his blazing blue eyes forever ready to seek out converts for Christ, a Billy Graham courageously venturing forth to the South American jungle in the name of the Lord.

Yet from another angle, Leslie can be judged an insensitive brute. The more we turn the pages, the more it becomes clear he has absolutely no respect or sensitivity for others, neither the people he's working with nor jungle natives, most especially the "wild, savage" Niaruna, their customs and tribal wisdom, their beliefs and sacred rituals.

In many respects, Martin Quarrier is Leslie's opposite - although trained at Moody Bible Institute, Martin possesses not a shred of personal charisma nor physical presence; Martin is an acne-scarred, bespectacled loser. However, Martin does maintain a strong sense of integrity and desire to better understand people - Martin even compiles a notebook on the Niaruna way of life as he did when he worked with the Sioux back in North Dakota. Martin recognizes his responsibilities as a missionary but he also envisions his converts accepting the tenets of Christianity within the context of their own social and religious beliefs.

Hazel Quarrier takes Fundamentalist Christianity to the extreme. For big, hulking Hazel, the snake infested jungle, the heathen savages, even the Catholic padre and his converts for Rome are counted as within the realm of Satan. When Hazel first lands at the Brazilian outpost, she spots a Mestizo man wobbly on his feet, urinating with his back to the small crowd. ""Dead drunk! And at this hour of the morning!" Hazel Quarrier exclaimed; she felt slapped across the face. But her remark struck her as silly and scared - not that she would have described herself as "sensible and effectual and courageous," yet she knew she was regarded in this way by those who knew her on her own home grounds, where good sense and diligence and moral courage meant something. in this place such qualities must be totally unfamiliar, much less effective." Oh, huge Hazel, if only the sinister jungle and all its devilish inhabitants could be taught to mirror your sparkling clean, God-fearing North Dakota.

Beautiful, soft-spoken Andy Huben is the type of person my dad called a true Christian. Andy opens her loving heart to all she meets, becoming a special friend to eight-year-old Billy Quarrier. By the inclusion of compassionate, generous Andy Huben, Peter Matthiessen provides a fair, rounded picture of Protestant missionaries in the jungle. In other words, our Zen Buddhist author does not use his novel as an opportunity to bash the Christian religion.

By my judgement, the two most interesting characters in the novel are Billy Quarrier and Louis Moon. Billy makes an instant connection with all the critters and each and every woman, man and child he encounters on his jungle adventure. Oh, Billy, I love you, buddy! Louis Moon is one complex man - fierce, tender, courageous, intellectual, emotional. At one point, as Moon flies his small plane dangerously low on fuel over uncharted jungle, a much concerned Leslie Huban contacts Moon on the radio. "What is your exact location; repeat, what is your exact location. Over." To which Louis Moon replies, "I'm at play in the fields of the Lord."

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is an adventure you don't want to miss. Pick up a copy and when you're finished, watch the film available on Amazon Prime. Moving. Powerful. Unforgettable.




Peter Matthiessen, 1927 - 2014

[TXGAL1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soldiers of fortune and Protestant missionaries find themselves at odds with their respective objectives in the jungles of Brazil. Each facing overwhelming odds to conquer their missions—to find a way out of the country that keeps a grip on them; or, to go farther into the deepest part of the jungle to make contact with an ancient Indian people and convert them to Christ because, of course, the natives have savage souls. Who will win in the end?

This story takes the reader on quite the adventure, vividly describing the various flora and fauna encountered. All of the seven deadly sins are in abundant supply, and innocence is in for a shock!

Written by Peter Matthiessen in 1965, AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD was selected by The New York Times as one of the best books of the year.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Peter Matthiessen's fiction books I have read, having read a couple of his non-fiction books and enjoyed them.
I wasn't sure whether I would like this - but Matthiessen's characters, so flawed and so realistic, in the setting of the jungles of the Amazon amongst savage native Indians - fantastic stuff.

The infantile feuding between Protestant and Catholic missionaries, all either corrupt, fooling themselves, blinded to their own ambition, or miserable in themselves. A couple of mercenaries, trapped in the town with their passports confiscated. Mind altering ayahuasca, the native hallucinogenic drug. The local el comandante, wielding power over whoever he can, and an array of Indians - from the wild to the tame.

The writing is vivid, the scenery is atmospheric, and the native way of life comes across as accurate and realistic.

Four stars.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 2 out of 5]

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is, on many levels, a bad trip, often beautifully described. Protestant and Catholic missionaries fight amongst themselves and against the local commandante and his American mercenaries over the fate of the Niaruna tribe somewhere in the jungles of the Amazon. I struggled to find a character with whom to identify, not quite connecting with evangelist Martin Quarrier, but stuck with him for lack of an alternative. There is a lot of sound and fury in the clash between modern Western civilization and Stone Age culture, but in the end, for me, it signified nothing.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book twice, in 1989 in Africa and in 1996 in Brazil, then I spent five years among the Yanomami Indians and was able to experience many of the things described in the story.

I recently listened to the audiobook version and found it moving, fascinating and thought-provoking. Anthony Heald does a great job with voices and accents, speaks the Spanish parts well and does a good job rendering the Niaruna language.

As a story, it is brilliantly told; Matthiessen's prose is vivid and his characters are richly crafted. The events are as tragic as anything in Shakespeare, but they are close to real life in their dimensions and horror. I have met many missionaries like the ones in this book, and a few mercenaries like Wolfie. The descriptions of life in the Amazon are precise and accurate; the book's depictions of indigenous peoples are marvelously evocative. No other book that I've read paints a clearer picture of the conflict between civilization and nature.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book ever, at least so far as I recall. Protestant missionaries, Catholic missionaries, and a Lakota con-man turned his own sort of missionary in the Amazon jungle. Everyone's flawed, everyone has a plan to save the Natives, and everyone loses their minds a bit. The most likeable character turns out to be the hellfire and brimstone Protestant missionary. They made a good movie of it, too, but the scenes on mind-altering drugs don't work so well in there. Peter Matthieson is the man, but stay away from his short stories -- they suck.
If you liked The Poisonwood Bible, well, this is better (but obviously not if you're going for a history of the Congo).

[Corey Woodcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Through the prism of the mist, the heat of the low jungle sky seem to focus on this wretched spot, where tarantulas and scorpions and stinging ants accompanied the mosquitoes and the biting fly into the huts, where the vampire bats, defecating even as they fed, would fasten on exposed toes at night, where one could never be certain that a bushmaster or fer-de-lance had not formed its cold coil in a dark corner. In the river, piranhas swam among the stingrays and candirus and the large crocodilians called lagartos; in adjacent swamps and forests lived the anaconda and the jaguar. But at Remate de Males such creatures were but irritants; the true enemies were the heat and the biting insects, the mud and the nagging fear, more like an ague, of the silent hostile people of the rainforest.”

I’ve been struggling even starting this review, because I don’t know how I can properly do this book justice in a couple hundred words. I enjoy all kinds of books—from fun with little actual substance, to genre novels, to classics and challenging works of what can only be described as high art. There’s a time and mood for them all—much like there’s a mood for Burger King, street food, masala, and caviar. This is one of those rare reading experiences that comes along every now and then that defies any kind of classification; with prose so rich you find yourself rereading whole pages, in awe of its beauty; complex characters; themes that apply just as much in the age of a digitally connected planet as they did in the deepest corners of Amazonia 75 years ago; lush imagery that lives and breathes just as much as the very rivers, jungles, swamps and people it depicts.

This book is it.

One of those times I’m blown away by both the story I’ve just read and the kind of mind that can pull this kind of thing out of the ether and put it to paper in such a way. Our basic plot revolves around a small group of missionaries who travel to the Western Amazon—where thousands of miles of flat jungle explode into mountains that stretch to the sky—to spread the Good News. We have the Quarriers, a family of three, who arrive in the jungle to meet the Hubens, a couple who has been at work already, pushing east into indigenous territory in hopes of making some fresh converts out of the Niaruna—a seemingly vicious tribe that isn’t afraid to put a few arrows through these people that come from the west and take their land, make them sick, degrade their women, and steal their cultural identity. Sharing this last outpost of anything resembling western civilization are the partners of Wolfie and Lewis Moon—the first being drifter from the US, the second being a half-Cheyenne Native North American who have somehow found themselves in this deep corner of South America with their “services” available to the highest bidder. We also have the mustache-twirling local Comandante, who is nobody’s friend. These characters mix as they all move east, and contact is made with the fearsome Niaruna. This is where our story begins.

This book addresses every aspect of missionary life, indigenous life, and what happens when the two meet that you could possibly think of. It’s a clash of culture, a clash of religion, and a clash of the spirit world with the ‘real’ world; a psychedelic, ayahuasca-infused journey into the depths of faith, love, assorted takes on idealism, and most notably into the heart of the jungle and the people who live there.

Peter Matthiessen has crafted something here like I have never read or experienced before. Everything shines and pulses with energy; the prose, the characters, and the setting. This is a novel, a social and religious commentary, and a work of high art. It has without a doubt become one of my favorite books of all time and I just cannot recommend it enough. At times beautiful, horrifying, and sad, it’s always probing both its own characters and setting, as well as the mind of the reader. 5/5

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an exuberant mess of a book! It galloped forward. So much happened. I mean, there is a sheer overwhelming flood of happenings in his book, assaulting the reader almost, at the pace of The Perils of Pauline, a series of "and-then, and then, and-then's"...

I loved that something so well written and so thoughtful and so philosophically rich could also be jam-packed with action. Ridiculous and great at the same time.

[Jennifer Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I realize this is an amazing piece of literature, but every time I pick it up, my heart breaks again. That is the mark of a brilliant author, but I just can't bear to keep feeling like this!

Prepare yourself, if you embark on this journey, for a descent into the worst outcomes for the evil and even the well-intentioned. This is a world of madness, hallucination, and multiple realities. The story is a kind of celebratory dance of darkness: crude language, addictions, lust, murder, genocide, rape, betrayal, insanity, loss of faith.

This novel is comparable to Heart of Darkness and The Poisonwood Bible. The Amazon itself is the true main character here as a heavy, dark, visceral, and eery force that pervades and smothers. I felt as if a hot, wet, heavy wool blanket were wrapped around my head.

Although the book is so disturbing, Matthiessen's prose is so luscious, I have made myself linger to savor it: "The sun grew swollen, lost its outline, turning the sky from limpid blue to dull cooked white, like a gigantic frying egg, until the sun itself turned a sick white, in a white sky." "Wolfe lay down on his bed without taking off his boots and fell asleep, a surprised expression on his face, mouth slightly open, and the handle of his knife protruding like an iron nose between the buttons of his twisted shirt. Moon sank down slowly on the edge of the other bed and contemplated the round face and the roistering beard, the inseparable earring and dark glasses and beret like grotesque toys." I opened to a couple of random pages and found those little gems. The whole book is like that.

I skimmed ahead so I know what I'm missing by stopping now. It truly is a brilliant piece of literature, but I just don't want to stay in this hellish world with these tragic people anymore.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Heart of a Different Darkness

My only previous encounter with the late Peter Matthiessen was his final novel, In Paradise, which impressed me immensely. So I went back almost fifty years to this novel of 1965, and was thrilled to see many of the same themes, yet treated in a strikingly different way. The protagonist of In Paradise attends a conference on the site of Auschwitz; a Gentile among Jews, he is joined by those of other faiths and some of no faith at all, none of which emerges unscathed from the moral issues that are raised. In At Play, Matthiessen tackles another genocide, or at least a potential one—that of Indian tribes in the upper Amazon—viewing it through the eyes of several different Christian missionaries, as well as at least one non-believer who may exhibit a truer humanity than any of them.

In the opening scene, Martin Quarrier, his wife Hazel, and nine-year-old son Billy fly over what I take to be the Peruvian Andes to a small frontier town on the headwaters of the Amazon. Martin is an evangelical missionary from North Dakota, sent to convert the Niaruna (four syllables), a savage tribe on the Espíritu river. He is met by his immediate superior, Leslie Huben, a gung-ho perennial boy scout, and his beautiful wife Andy. Also at the airstrip is Padre Xantes, representative of what Leslie persists in calling the Opposition, and the local administrator, Commandante Guzmán, a venial character whose comic manner conceals a real danger. Parked on the field, Martin notices a beat-up aircraft with "Wolfie & Moon Inc., Small Wars & Demolition" painted on the side. This belongs to two soldiers of fortune, nominally American, but persona-non-grata in most countries that they go; Guzmán intends to use them for his own conquest of the Niaruna. Between them, these nine people (but especially Martin Quarrier and Lewis Moon) comprise most the cast of the rest of this substantial novel, other than the indigenous characters that will play an increasingly important part later on.

Matthiessen wrote this some three decades before Barbara Kingsolver came out with The Poisonwood Bible, that other now-classic novel about a missionary venture gone wrong, and I am sure that comparisons will have been made. The back cover makes the inevitable link with the Conrad of Nostromo and of course Heart of Darkness. But the author I thought of most strongly at first was Graham Greene, especially in the scenes involving Padre Xantes, whose debates with the evangelicals are a masterpiece of theology disguised as worldly comedy. But he is a relatively minor character. Matthiessen's main focus among the Christians is the dynamic that grows between Martin, Hazel, Leslie, and Andy, as each reacts in different ways to the conditions in which they find themselves. I know the Les Hubens of the world from years of listening to delegates to the Worldwide Missionary Convention that was one of the summer highlights of my seaside town while I was growing up, and have long since come to see through their rhetoric. At first, I thought that Martin would be made out of the same stuff, but no: he is too brave, too intelligent, and too honest:

You see, a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces. […] I needed badly to talk to someone who didn't refer each problem to the Lord.

This is Martin talking near the end of the book to Lewis Moon, who is in many ways his spiritual opposite, but is perhaps the most like him as a man. Moon plays a fascinating role in the novel, and may actually turn out to be its real protagonist. Conrad went upriver, glimpsed the fringe of his Heart of Darkness, and retreated exclaiming, "The horror, the horror!" Matthiessen, on the other hand, goes deep inside. In a series of chapters that may make or break the book for many readers, the author uses Moon as a kind of spirit guide, first into the recesses of his own psyche in a near-fatal overdose of a hallucinogenic drug, and then by having him penetrate the tribe of the Niaruna themselves. I won't say how this comes about, but the sections among the Indios raise ethical issues at a more basic level that makes the concerns of the missionaries seem petty and self-serving. Moon is half Cherokee, though he feels himself to have been a bad one; this background gives him a respect for tribal ways that the others simply do not possess. We must not forget, too, that Matthiessen is an award-winning naturalist and ethnographer; while his account of life among the Niaruna is presumably imaginary, it is imagination guided by observation and intelligence.

As in life, this story is a tragedy. Several of the original nine characters will end up dead or incapacitated. Some faiths will be lost or shaken. It is clear that the cards are stacked against the Niaruna or other tribes retaining their way of life intact. Yet I admired the way that Matthiesen ended the novel on a moment of balance. It would have been so easy for him merely to condemn or squeeze out his last drop of blood. I found his alternative, in the last three or four chapters, both moving and beautiful.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book can be read strictly as a great story; but it is hard for it not to resonate within myself at least on so many levels: finding oneself, the face of evil(man corrupted by greed and power--not a new concept by any means, but very well eximplified by characters and deeds perpetrated throughout the story as well as motives--some even done in the misguided perpetuation of good!) Feuding religous factions that are more interested in the how of accomplishing Christ's message of spreading the good word(and just the subtlety of the changing of words can obsfucate the message and magnify the religous beliefs of all party's concerned with religion.) than the objective to bring not a system of dogma but spirituality. Something the flawed main protagonist, a scoundrel of epic proportions, who in need of saving himself from himself the most, is villified rather than seen for what he is: a human struggling with the most innate question, where do I fit in?

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, lots of books start out strongly and then fizzle out towards the end. This one, though, felt almost the opposite. It started out slowly, and I was dubious that I was going to like it, but it seemed to pick up strength as it went along, and by the time I finished, I loved it.

The subject matter is one that really fascinates me: isolated indigenous tribes. This particular one is in some unspecified place in South America. Probably Bolivia. The setting actually feels more like Brazil, but it's somewhere where Spanish is spoken, rather than Portuguese.

The story focuses on three main groups of people: a barely contacted indigenous South American tribe, whose previous contacts with the modern world have been mostly negative, some gung-ho Christian missionaries, who refuse to take no for an answer, and two down-on-their-luck smugglers/mercenaries who are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and looking for a way to get out.

This is the kind of book that could have easily turned into a polemic about all kinds of topics, as it touches on so many subjects that bring out such strong feelings in people: religion and technology and what the modern world has done to us. Instead, Matthiessen manages to keep the story squarely focused on the characters, who are developed with a great deal of nuance and sympathy.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, a great story, and Matthiessen's description of life in the Amazon jungle and of the Niaruna is fascinating. At the same time, some of the writing is pretty (shockingly) hokey. So while I'd like to give this 4-stars, I can't quite do it.

[Barb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but the characters were mostly awful & the setting pretty grungy.

[Aaliyah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mercenaries and missionaries. And a bad love. Not much has changed, even though this book is several decades old. The amazon is still being destroyed by zealous fools. It is a powerful book. Re-reading it recently left me feeling confused, but fascinated.

[Alphawoman · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read a Peter Matthiessen novel for such a long time. I started to read one several years ago - the one about Nepal - but after I'd read fifty pages I realized I would like it one day but that I couldn't concentrate enough to enjoy it then. I have fewer excuses and fewer distractions these days, so I persevered this time. Through the lines and lines of words, so many words. Sometimes I had to skim just to keep moving through paragraphs, which makes me think admire Matthiessen's writing at the same time it makes me not want to read another novel by him for a while.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is about missionaries and native people in the jungles of South America, and it reminded me of The Poisonwood Bible, though it was written before TPB. Both novels depict the missionaries and their families as troubled and having to survive through experiences that make them question their faith. There is also an American Indian character who lives with the jungle Indians and lets them believe that he is a spirit-god. The story and the characters were complex but not too complicated, and I think it would be a fun book to read and write about analytically, but I wish the person who read my copy before me had kept her notes to herself.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Marcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly insightful story raising the question of Christianity’s role in the genocide of Natives in South America. Powerfully well-written.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Peter Matthessen is a naturalist and documentary filmmaker. At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel set in the Amazon. The same year he wrote the novel he also worked on the famous but somewhat controversial documentary Dead Birds.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is another take on Heart of Darkness. A mercinary and a family of missionaries both come to a remote village for polar oppsoite reasons leaving the villagers in a tug of war. As with Conrad's tale, fantasticism ultimately destroys the fanatic.

Matthiessen's version of the dark journey up river is a far more straightforward narrative to Conrad's. I liked At Play in the Fields of the Lord more than I did Heart of Darkness but I still find the themes rather hard to swallow.

Readers who have enjoyed Barbara Kinsolver's Poisonwood Bible will probably like At Play in the Fields of the Lord.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

A penetrating, visceral novel that plays out in a backwater hell-hole village deep in the Bolivian Amazon. The cast of characters includes fundamentalist Christian missionaries, a drunken and thoroughly debauched military commander, two professional mercenaries, and a tribe of pre-contact Amazonian tribesman. This amazing ensemble sets the stage for deep, and often profoundly disturbing insights into the nature of the human mind, the ambiguities surrounding moral behavior, and our capacity for both intentional and unintentional evil. A must-read book that is simultaneously penetrating and entertaining. Not for the faint of heart.


The book's utter authenticity derives from Matthiessen's own travels in South America during a year-long assignment for The New Yorker magazine. It was made into a film directed by Hector Barbenco("The Kiss of the Spider Woman").

[Ties · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, real and captivating, but ultimately not my type of book. It's depressing and underscores man's worst aspects. Perhaps that makes it a good book but for me it was 3 stars. I simply thought it was not enjoyable.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Such earthily irreverent work reminds me of Tom Robbins at his best.

A family comes to Remate del Males to help expand the missionary founded by a young couple. The missionaries want to save the natives not only from their paganism but also from the catalicos who have been in the jungles of South America for hundred of years. The natives are particularly resistant to conversion and somewhat adept at playing both sides. And Lewis Moon is a Native American from South Dakota who leads a shady life and the local government official of the district won’t let him leave the area.

The earth tones in which Matthiessen portrays these people in their pride, short-sightedness, bumbling, sometimes sincerity is graphic and tragic, and blind-siding. And beautiful.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with a previous reviewer that this is similar in theme to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A group of American evangelical missionaries move to the Amazon to convert the natives. This is a dark story leaving the reader with more questions than answers. The prose is excellent (albeit lengthy at times) and the characters are well-developed.
The film version is superb and has an outstanding cast including a scene with Kathy Bates that is one of the greatest performances ever done on screen.

[Abby Howell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written book about missionaries in the rain forest of South America. The physical details are evocative and mesmerizing. There was a lot to think about as I read. For myself, I did not find a psychological connection to the characters, but Mattiessen is such a good writer, I was willing to step into their world and live it as they were living it.

[Toni Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

So sad, yet beautiful. What a writer! I'd like to read more of his work.

[Mac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Presumptuous now comes to mind. In the 1990s, I read Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson and then Far Tortuga; and though I didn’t fully understand those books, I’ve always appreciated the author’s creativity and writing abilities. Now in 2021, I’ve just finished At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and it feels prsumptuous of me to suggest how this novel might be different or even better. With admiration for the author’s talent, here goes.

With At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Matthiessen creates a chaotic world in a South American rain forest, a world featuring a collection of failed characters in a variety of minor conflicts. Missionaries (one Catholic, two others best defined as anti-Catholic) battle for the minds of the Indians. Those Indians battle among themselves. The local comandante battles to control his territory, and two mercenaries battle with everyone, including each other.

Throughout, I was able to visualize the author’s chaotic world, but throughout, I felt the narrative itself was also chaotic as if Matthiessen occasionally had lost control, often spinning the story into multiple directions. A jumbled timeline and an overly long hallucinogenic trip are a couple of examples. Critique #1: Matthiessen paints a vivid picture (both realistic and impressionistic) of a South American world, but his story about chaos is itself sometimes chaotic.

Next point. The characters, an unpleasant lot, are mostly ineffective at accomplishing anything. As a reader, it’s no fun to spend time with them. Only Billy, the young son of a missionary, is an appealing person, but he, while important, plays a peripheral role.

All the adults use others, each with suspect motives and shady morality. The comandante wants to control the natives, and the mercenaries want their financial reward to help enforce that control. The missionaries use religious converts to build up competing headcounts with little regard for the Indians’ salvation. The two couples show little affection with their spouses using each other to score argumentative points with no ability to resolve differences. Critique #2: Matthiessen portrays the various conflicts well, but the characters’ suspect goals and pervasive questionable morality ultimately create a heavy, wearing reading experience.

Last point. Because many characters do not speak English, much of the story is told by the narrator, not through direct interaction and dialogue. Imagine watching a movie with much of the story presented by an off-camera, voice-over narrator. As a result, I often felt a step removed from the action as if I were reading a strange travelogue, not a novel with living characters. Critique #3: Because of the language differences, Matthiessen must have his omniscient narrator tell much of his tale. As a result, that tale comes alive infrequently.

So, for me, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, has a chaotic story structure, a collection of unpleasant people, and a narrator removed from the action. The result is a book I didn’t enjoy. By the end, I was saying, “Can’t everyone just leave the Indians alone?” In this novel, Matthiessen has achieved a lot; he has created an imaginative world with plenty of lessons to be learned about human nature. I just didn’t want to spend time in his world. As noted, given the author’s accomplishments and reputation, excuse me for being presumptuous with my critiques.

[John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Joseph Conrad had tried ayahuasca --- that is how "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" resonated with me. Mathiessen brings the reader into a dark jungle populated by a host of conflicted and morally flawed protagonists for whom innocence is long gone and all existence is cynical and absurd. Survival is neither sought nor prized. Power is the sole pursuit against the inevitable, all-consuming void.

The epigraph, a quote from Hermann Hesse reads :

"The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life".

Matthiessen is a superb writer and an acute observer of both the natural world and the human condition and he knows how to plumb the darkest heart of humanity. He can also, when you are seeking light, offer you a silver moon and the last unplucked eye of a bloated corpse until you question the very concept of salvation. If there is a natural history of the Soul it might very well be written by Mathiessen.

As I read i thought of the week I spent trekking in the jungles of Malaysia, in particular when I was squatting to defecate and the relentless trains of ants incorporated my form as just another obstacle in their endless marching. Drops of water from the forest canopy fell. Sweat never stopped and I realized the specific small irrelevance of any single organism in such a dense web of life.
As I read the last page of "At play in the fields of the Lord" i returned to the first, for the best books end as they began thematically, like Robert Jordan laying down on the pine-needled floor, like a snake eating it's tail, like Kurtz dancing in the flames.
Like the moon rising into darkness again.

[Helena]

Now and again, I read a book, that I don’t know how to rate in Goodreads, upon pressing the I have finished this book”-button, moving it from Currently Reading to Have Read. This is such a book.
Did I like it? No. Not really.
Did I enjoy reading it? Not particularly.
So it warrants a really low rating? Well. No. It doesn’t. Just because it’s not an easy read, and it’s somewhat confusing, incomprehensible at times, it’s not a book that deserves anything less than three stars (on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest rating). Possibly four. Maybe even five, because I honor the complexity of it, the experience, or research that must have gone into the preparations.

There are sentences, passages, that I find extremely beautiful.
Some that are so descriptive, I can feel the green rotting smell of the jungle while reading.
Others that speaks of truth (perhaps even Truth?).

Perhaps it’s one of those books that I am happy to have read, rather than having been happy reading it?

(Full book reflection here: https://helenaroth.com/at-play-in-the...)