The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)

This book was fascinating and mysterious, and it kept me wondering what would happen next. It is a fictional novel about a priest in Mexico during a time of anti-Catholicism when Catholicism was outlawed. This priest had been on the run for years, and the police had been unable to catch him. We start in the story by being introduced to different people, and it is unclear what is happening. However, as we progress through the pages, the story starts to focus on the priest, known as the whisky priest. We learn he has many moral struggles and is pulled between certain vices or sins and his higher calling.It is indeed a thriller novel. Throughout the book, I wondered where the story was going, what was his reasoning for staying in Mexico, and whether he would give up the drink and would be able to confess and get himself back on the right path. Despite his struggles, he still pursued his priestly duties, his higher calling. We see this moral contention, and it allows us to ask these moral questions to discuss. Every time the priest did something good, I was cheering him on.I would vouch to say a few things about the whisky priest. He kept his vocation, even if he admitted to being a bad priest. He was self-aware of himself and his sins and faults. In the ways that he kept his vocation, he preserved his dignity. He rejected the evils of the state. He fulfilled his priestly duties, particularly in celebrating mass and giving confessions. He struggled with his sins.I am glad to have read this book and enjoyed it. It was very engaging and thought-provoking. I would recommend it to those who enjoy reflecting on moral dilemmas and fans of thrillers who appreciate a suspenseful narrative set against the backdrop of religious persecution.

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.

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?