Set near the source of the Amazon River in the Peruvian Andes, Matthiessen’s novel begins in the last outpost of civilization, a ramshackle mission town. Here, the missionaries Leslie and Andy Huben meet the newly arrived missionaries Martin and Hazel Quarrier and their son Billy.

The other major characters are introduced as counterpoints to each other: Padre Xantes, the Catholic prefect, and Commandante Guzman represent the local authorities, while Wolfie and Merriwether Lewis Moon represent the many transients who come to the Amazon to dissipate themselves or to disappear.

Moon is the novel’s protagonist. Part Cheyenne, part Choctaw, and part African American, he is the only adult non-native to have some genuine interest in and empathy for the culture of the local tribe, the Niaruna. The tribe has been much reduced by exposure to Western diseases against which they have had no immunity.

In the aftermath of this cultural catastrophe, some of the remaining Niaruna have lost some of their resistance to Christianity and have become nominal converts. But the case of one of these converts, whose given name is Uyuyu but who is called Yoyo—with unintended irony—by the missionaries, demonstrates that what might appear to be a workable compromise between the two cultures is only an arbitrary mixture of their most superficial aspects, with no sustaining core of meaning.

To further exacerbate the Niaruna’s predicament, they get caught in the middle of denominational conflicts among the missionaries. Moreover, these conflicts are themselves exacerbated by the missionaries’—and especially Hazel Quarrier’s—inability to adjust to the natural environment of the rainforest.

In fact, they are so clearly as much out of their element as the Niaruna are in theirs that their efforts to convert the Niaruna to a new way of life quickly begin to seem stubbornly and even preposterously wrong-headed. Ultimately, the missionaries are more interested in demonstrating the power of their own religious convictions than in meeting the needs, spiritual or otherwise, of the Niaruna.

All of these tensions come to a head when Martin Quarrier is savagely killed by Uyuyu. The Europeans interpret Quarrier’s death as a martyrdom, but it is actually just a further demonstration of his incompetence as a missionary. In retaliation for the killing, Guzman hires Moon to fly a plane over the forest and drop bombs on a native village. Instead, Moon parachutes from the plane, leaving it to crash into the trackless forest.

Misinterpreting his fall from the sky, the local Niaruna treat him as a god. At first, he feels as though he has recovered something of what his ancestors had lost in North America. But eventually, he recognizes that he can never recover the Niaruna’s contented obliviousness to the broader world nor be completely at ease with their equal capacities for great generosity and terrible savagery.

Fleeing ahead of Guzman’s pursuit, Moon travels downriver in a malarial, hallucinatory quest for some sustaining spiritual truth. And, at least for a moment, as a solitary soul “lost” in a vast wilderness, he seems to achieve it.

Even including novels in the action-adventure genre, At Play in the Fields of the Lord is one of the relatively few American novels to be set in the Amazon basin. Some critics have complained about Matthiessen’s radical bias against Western culture and, in particular, about his very negative characterization of Christian missionaries—a characterization that seems to ignore completely the hardships missionaries have endured and the good they have done in many regions of the world.

Yet, despite its exotic setting and the perception of a rather heavy-handed radical bias, the novel explores many traditional American themes: the notion of the frontier as a defining and transforming phenomenon—specifically, the paradoxical American notion that escape into the wilderness can represent a search for one’s defining “place” in the world; the tensions between the primitive and the civilized, the innocent and the corrupt; the narrow boundaries between righteousness and self-righteousness, and between self-exploration and self-indulgence; the dangers to the self posed by both community and isolation; and the initiation of the American abroad—although in most instances this has involved an American’s immersion into a more civilized, rather than more primitive, environment.

Matthiessen challenges conventional Western assumptions about civilization and progress. His novel belongs to the tradition of Western works questioning the efficacy and morality of colonialism—a tradition including such novelists as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary, and Graham Greene. But while many postcolonial critics have complained about the negative stereotyping of “natives” even in the work of Western critics of colonialism, Matthiessen seems to have transcended that underlying bias.

The influence of Matthiessen’s novel can be seen in such subsequent, noteworthy works as Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. Moreover, the adaptation of the novel to film by director Hector Babenco (Saul Zaentz/MCA Universal, 1991), after a quarter-century of false starts chronicled in C. Brown’s Esquire article, gave the novel something of a second life.

Sources

Brown, C. “At Play in the Fields of Hollywood.” Esquire, July 1991, pp. 110–118.

Caesar, Terry. “‘So That’s the Flag’: The Representation of Brazil and the Politics of Nation in American Literature.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 41 (Summer 1999): 365–384.

Cooley, John. “Matthiessen’s Voyages on the River Styx: Deathly Waters, Endangered Peoples.” In Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, 167–192. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Escorel, L. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: Confronting the Mythic—and the Not So Mythic.” Omni (December 1991): 10.

Matthiessen, Peter. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. New York: Random House, 1965.

Patteson, Richard F. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: The Imperialist Idea and the Discovery of Self.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 2 (1979): 5–14.

Rendleman, Todd. “‘Evil’ Images in At Play in the Fields of the Lord: Evangelicals and Representations of Sexuality in Contemporary Film.” Velvet Light Trap 46 (Fall 2000): 26–39.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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