The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)

... is a novel that's obviously a work of exceptional literary craft but that you don't like. I don't like this novel, though I read it avidly. I'm far more comfortable with Graham Greene's "entertainments" -- the satirical novels that Greene himself considered lesser works -- than with his fictional expressions of his "Catholic Communist" conscience. That's what my aversion amounts to -- a distaste for Greene's philosophical message. I have the same problem with the novels of Vargas Llosa; the comic works like "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" please me immensely, but the political/ideological works like "Death in the Andes" repel me intellectually. "The Power and the Glory" is set in Latin America, as is "Our Man in Havana". Both novels portray societies burdened by corruption and violence under elitist tyrannies, the former a tyranny of ideology and the latter a tyranny of wealth. A huge gap separated the writing of the two books, that is, Green's experience of World War 2 and his partial disillusionment with 'quietist' Catholicism. The protagonist of "The Power and the Glory" is a fugitive priest, a 'wanted man' under the regime of would-be purifiers and saviors of the peasantry. These ideologues could just as easily be fascist as communist; the closest reality to their extremism might be the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot. The Priest -- a drinker, a "whiskey priest -- evades capture for years, until he is possibly the last priest still at large in a particularly vindictive anti-clerical state of southern Mexico. His only hope is to slip across the mountains into another state where anti-clericism isn't as extreme. He isn't entirely clear, however, whether his 'vocation' isn't martyrdom -- though he considers himself unworthy of such a beatification -- or else survival to be of service to parishioners. For a small, weak, drunkard of a man, the Priest shows incredible endurance and tenacity; in the end, he accepts betrayal as his fulfillment of his sacerdotal role. The obvious association of his inevitable sacrifice with that of Jesus Christ is the core message of the book. Unless the reader is willing to 'privilege' the Priest's commitment to Christian sanctity over the commitment to a religion of social engineering -- the ideology of the Lieutenant who pursues the Priest inexorably -- one wrong-headedness seems more or less as bad as another. There's a comparison to be made -- one that seems almost inevitable -- between "The Power and the Glory" and Malcolm Lowry's novel "Under the Volcano". Both novels are set in Mexico in the 1930s, under one of the most brutal 'caudillo' regimes. The central characters are both novels are drunkards and self-haters. Both 'heroes' are like moths attracted to their own obliteration, and both novels depict the core corruption of Power that ineluctably results in 'fascism' broadly understood. But Lowry's novel is 'orders of magnitude' superior to Greene's -- more vivid, more viscerally disturbing, more honest. In Lowry's book, every character, however briefly present, is intensely encountered psychologically. Next to Lowry, Greene seems conventional and verbose. But "Under the Volcano" is one of the "ten best" novels of the 20th C, in another league from anything Greene wrote or could have written.

It is a terribly sad, but good book. I had never read Graham Greene, although I had certainly heard of him. I had earlier dismissed him as a sort of John Le Carre, writing about the complexities of international espionage. However, then Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa praised The Power and the Glory in Vargas Llosa's series of essays on various writers entitled The Truth of Lies, and so I thought that I would give the book a shot. It is not an easy read nor, at first glance, an uplifting one, although one can seem moments of redemption and revelation laid out in the book. Everything is set in a Mexican state that I believe is meant to represent Tabasco during the 1920's, shortly after the Institutional Revolutionary Party's ascension to power. At that time, and in that state, it seems that the Mexican government was carrying out a pitiless purge of Roman Catholic priests, and although there were a number of believers, they observed the Catholic rites underground. It appears that the government effected the purge using philosophical observations akin to Lenin's observation that religion is the opiate of the masses. Greene had spent time in Mexico prior to writing the novel, and wrote a memoir that expressed his loathing for the country and all that he saw. And certainly, both the foreigners and the natives living in the novel's setting are deeply unhappy. The former suffer from a profound sense of dislocation, and often dream of going home. The latter are oppressed by unbelievably cruel hardships, including political repression and hunger. Vargas Llosa explained that the novel presented a conflict between the upright Lieutenant, who is totally committed to his secular beliefs and hopes to extirpate the church in order to do away with obscurantism in the hopes of bringing paradise to this world. His bite noire is a priest, who is sinful, guilty of fornicating and drinking and yet, much more human than the rigid Lieutenant. However, I did not see it that way. The Lieutenant is admirable in his own way, particularly when compared to his corrupt and complacent superiors. However, Greene paints the Lieutenant in broad brush strokes and spends relatively little time with him. Greene spends far more time with the corrupted "whiskey-priest," and the real conflict is between the whisky-priest's attempts to discern the nature of his own calling, which he pursues with increasing diligence, which is remarkable considering horrific suffering that he passes through, including near starvation. Still, the whiskey priest cannot decide if he was closer to God when he was a younger priest, relatively well to do and with a parish, or if he is closer now, even if he spends the night in jail and even if he robs rotten meat from a dog because he is hungry. For me, Greene uses the whiskey-priest to explore various theological conundrums. As the novel progresses, we see that the whiskey-priest is becoming weary of life, which is understandable because he has been on the run for eight years. And yet, when he returns to the very state where the police are chasing him, ostensibly to hear the last confession of a murderer, Greene makes clear that in part, the whiskey priest has begun to despair of this life. Thus, Greene asks us to ask if the priest's decision to return is a Christ-like gesture, in which he willingly sacrifices his own life for the betterment of another? Or it is a selfish gesture - in which his desire to die is in a way reflective of a selfish desire to cease living and thus cease suffering? On that note, a remarkable aspect of the novel is the tremendous hatred that nearly every character feels towards this world. And yet, that contributes to the novel's power, because Christianity indeed deals and indeed to a degree condones a contempt for this life. Regardless of the feelings that he may have harbored about Mexico, Greene sets out the priest's struggles with great subtlety and precision, showing him advancing towards a nearly beatific state at times while alternatively feeling repulsed and disgusted by the people around him. At each point, we are encouraged to ask if the priest is moving closer to God, or indeed farther away.

Greene may have had a tortured relationship with Catholicism, but he had a genius for viewing every situation from a Catholic perspective.

This is compelling novel with narrative drive and vivid, powerful scenes. Forty years ago I thought highly of it, but now I find Greene's Catholic emphasis detracting. Even a medieval institution like the Catholic Church has evolved since 1940 when this book was written, leaving behind a good bit (though not all) of the oversimplified dogma given such emphasis in these pages. To me, there is an underlying didacticism in the book that ultimately wags the dog of narrative, stretching its credibility. Is any priest expected to risk his life to hear the confession of a murderer? Will his soul really be lost for not doing so? These are not the Christian conflicts that Dostoyevsky, a much more mature writer, wrestles with, but just a lot of hokey contrivance.

The Power and the Glory, set in 1930s Mexico during a period of state persecution against the Catholic Church, follows a whisky priest on the run and a police lieutenant who vows to rid his small corner of the world of the clergy. Their paths, fraught with danger and moral dilemmas, intersect with a group of unfortunate characters, each of whom profoundly impacts the fate of both men. Mr. Tench was the whisky priest’s first encounter at a port where they both searched for their own version of freedom. “A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.” A dentist by trade, Mr. Tench, had come to Mexico from England nearly twenty years earlier and found the country to be a bit like the Hotel California — he’d checked out long ago but could never leave. As the doleful dentist and the camouflaged cleric share a glass of bootlegged brandy while waiting for a boat, fate intervenes and pulls the padre back into the bowels of a country from which he was not likely to escape. “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.” This was not a story to be rushed. I found myself reflecting on how prejudice can cloud our vision. Life is vast, and we limit ourselves when we close our hearts to other perspectives. Some passages halted my reading, leaving me to gaze into the distance as I basked in their brilliance. The narrative was a potent exploration of darkness, with occasional rays of hope to light the way. The praise I’ve seen for this book is well deserved. The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner.

You often hear THE POWER AND THE GLORY called Greene's masterpiece. Is this justified? Certainly, as John Updike points out in the excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition (one of the few intros that can be read before the book itself), Greene approach to his central theme here is purer, more elemental, than in his other works. That theme, as so often with him, is the nature of goodness, especially as seen within the Catholic faith. He delights in writing novels which have one foot in some other genre, about characters whose morality is either questionable (the venal policeman in THE HEART OF THE MATTER , the adulterous wife in THE END OF THE AFFAIR ) or outright evil (the young hoodlum in BRIGHTON ROCK ), and finding some shred of redemption in them. The story of the repentant thief at the Crucifixion must have had special significance for Greene. But in these novels, the juxtaposition of the Catholic religion with the secular adventure can seem strained or even bizarre. In THE POWER AND THE GLORY, Greene's principal character is a Catholic priest whose religious identity is of the essence. But he is a sinner, a "whiskey priest" who has fallen down in his observances and in many other areas also. The setting is Southern Mexico in 1938, at a time when the Church was banned as enemies of the people, and priests were rounded up and either forced to marry or be shot. The unnamed anti-hero is the last priest in the area, and there is a price on his head. As he attempts to escape to a safer state, the questions of who he is as a man and as a priest come into stark clarity, and the answers will be what ultimately determine his actions. But, theme apart, Greene seems different in this book from the writer I know from most of his other novels. There is more than a hint of Dostoyevsky here. Even more, the territory, terse writing style, and a certain grandeur of theme remind me of Hemingway. But I am more struck by the absence of the more usual Greene, the writer who could so brilliantly capture the lives of almost real people functioning in various aspects of the middle-class world, and then take the reader into their inner souls. Greene has always been magnificent in describing places, and that is true here also. But he is also unmatched in the social setting: the way people do their jobs, their social and professional rivalries, their place in the community. All have names and all have the wealth of detail that go with a name. Certainly the minor characters in this book have names and just this kind of lives, but the Priest and his nemesis the Lieutenant of Police are nameless. In that sense they can appear as elemental forces, or as two faces of Everyman. But I miss the greater detail of the other Greene books, and for that reason found myself enjoying this much less.

A well told story by Graham Greene about how a priest practicing an outlawed religion tries to survive in a society that wants him dead. Great character development and a tight story tie everything together.

A small spot of brandy in his glass - as if it was an animal to which he gave shelter. I must have read all of Graham Greene in the 1970s and then I forget most about him. I remember him as a follower of Conrad and an ancestor of John Le Carré. Many good films were made from Greene novels and `entertainments'. Most recent one that I remember was a good version of the Quiet American with Michael Caine. I chose The Power and the Glory for my first revisit after over 30 years. I was half prepared not to like it, but I failed with that. This was one of Greene's early great successes. It has been filmed by John Ford with Henry Fonda. Greene wrote it in the late 1930s after a short visit to Mexico. It is about a `whisky priest' who is on the run from a fascist anti-clerical death sentence. (Greene himself had converted to Catholicism in the 1920s, but was not overly going on about it. He claims that the piety of simple people in Mexico did much to make him a better Catholic.) The priest never acquires a name in the novel, differently from his compadre José, who gives in to the new law that priests must marry. Our priest drinks and he has a daughter, but he remains loyal to his oath in other respects. His main hunter is a young police lieutenant, a prototype of the `idealistic' fascist. He leads the Red Shirts. The priest has the courage to be a coward. He puts others at risk by not giving himself up. After a series of narrow escapes his mental power is drained. He longs to be caught. After rejecting the martyr role for years he begins to embrace the idea out of sheer mental and physical exhaustion. His flight is like the bad dream when you want to run and cant. Greene was a skilled story teller and he was good at leaving the discovery of meaning to us. That's how it should be. The story is timeless and placeless in its basic substance. Mexico is an accident. Therefore Greene's superficial knowledge about the place doesn't disturb. This is just a miserable tropical place with jungles and swamps, like any other. The novel has been included in several `best 100' lists and I wouldn't deny that it has a claim to such a position. I think that it should have a good chance to survive for some more time as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Greene was also quite a master of style. I can enjoy him sentence by sentence. The more surprising is his blackout on page 19 of this edition, when `great grey cylindrical waves' lift the ship's bows (and the hobbled turkeys shift on deck). Come again? Cylindrical waves?