Book Review: The Chaplain’s War, by Brad R. Torgersen

I met Brad Torgersen at LTUE this year, and attended several panels he was part of. The concept of his book piqued my interest: a starfleet chaplain, stuck behind enemy lines in a war to save humanity, tries to convince the aliens that humanity is worth sparing. I nearly picked it up from the library when I found it there, but I’ve got a tall enough physical book reading stack already. So when I found out it was available on audio I waited for my next Audible credit and picked it up.

I probably should have picked it up from the library. The reader on this one was distracting. He’d pause in the middle of sentences, sometimes joining the rest of the sentence to the next sentence. His pauses often changed the meaning of sentences and required me to mentally backtrack to reassemble what he’d said in the right order. I’ve heard some books with merely passible narrators (my current book is an example), and I can handle them okay. This one…was bad.

Which is unfortunate. “The Chaplain’s War” is a good book. The narrative follows two temporal paths through most of the book. The main path follows chaplain’s assistant Harrison Barlow in the “present”. In humanity’s first war with the Mantis he was confined on a prison planet doing his best to carry in his ecumenical duties when a Mantis scholar comes to visit him in a quest to understand the human concept of religion. Determining that humans are worthy of further study, the scholar convinces his people to stop their war of extermination.

Now it’s ten years later and the Mantis have had enough time to study humanity. They’re determined to restart the war and finish the extermination that mankind was incapable of stopping. Barlow, considered a hero for his role in stopping the first war, is sent to try to stop the looming second war. And of course things go wrong pretty quickly, leaving Barlow scrambling to stay alive and find a way to convince the Mantis to stop the slaughter a second time.

The other temporal path looks at how Barlow got here in the first place; his enlistment in the face of the Mantis threat, his training, his path into the chaplain corps, and his ill-fated mission to Purgatory, the world on which he was imprisoned.

Through it all runs the thread of Barlow’s own beliefs–or lack thereof. Though a chaplain’s assistant, and a pretty good one, he claims no particular beliefs for himself–something everyone, Mantis included, seems to find odd.

Torgersen paints a detailed picture of life in a future military, undoubtedly drawing on his own experience in the Army Reserve. Even more interesting is his depiction of the Mantis, a cyborg-insect race that achieved advanced technology faster than any other known race. With that advantage, and in accordance with their own pragmatic, Mantis-centric perspective, they’ve already wiped out two other sentient competitors. Torgersen put a great deal of thought into understanding his aliens and making them alien, plausible and accessible.

Taken as a whole, the book feels more like space opera than epic, though there are certainly elements of epic to it. But ultimately the book is personal and intimate, more focused on the minds of the participants and their relationships than the raging war around them. There are moments and elements of action and peril, but ultimately that’s not what the book is about, and for being set amid war, it’s surprisingly gentle and introspective–almost passive, perhaps, though that sounds like a criticism when it’s not. Here it works. In other stories it probably wouldn’t. Barlow is a hero, to be sure. He is the main driver that allows the resolution to emerge, but–as in life–there are some things he simply can’t do, and others are needed to provide that. But even then, this is largely not a story about people being heroic, simply people being themselves.

It’s an odd book, but a good one. That oddity may have been exaggerated for me by the disjointed delivery of the reader, but I suspect even with a better reader it would still feel different. “The Chaplain’s War” and “Fire With Fire”, the book I’m listening to currently, are both published by Baen, and are about as different as books can be.

I enjoyed “The Chaplain’s War”, but I’m fully aware that not everyone will. I found it an interesting journey.