Customer Reviews

The Power And The Glory (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (Penguin Classics (Prebound))

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I am only now discovering Graham Greene; this was the second of his works that I've read. It is not a book to be taken up for a little light entertainment; I'm still digesting it, you might say. It stays with a person. Superficially, it is about government oppression and man's inhumanity to man; more specifically, it is about love and its dual power to transform and destroy. Read it on whatever level you choose; basically, it is about a Roman Catholic priest struggling with his faith and intense guilt while trying to elude the forces of a government that has declared his religion illegal. I came away from it moved and disturbed, which in my opinion (humble tho' it be) is the purpose of literature: to create a mirror for the reader herself. What flaws do I posess that masquerade as virtue, what overpowering desire truly motivates my actions? In this novel the main character, the whiskey priest, takes flight not only from his persecutors but also from himself; in the end he finds he can only redeem himself by returning. And there I find another question to haunt me...did the priest indeed find redemption in the end?

I really don't know how to review this novel; there is simply too much the novel has to say to cover it all her in a short review. Anything I write will be totally inadequate. I can only say that The Power and the Glory is certainly one of the greatest novels written in the Twentieth Century.

The novel is the story of a priest in Mexico in a state which has outlawed Christianity. The priest is trying to get out of the state and away from the athiestic lieutenant who's attempting to capture him, but the priest's Christian duty keeps calling him back into the state and into danger. The priest is also waging a war within himself. He is a good man but definitely a sinner, and he struggles to cure himself of his vices and struggles to believe that he can gain salvation.

The Power and the Glory assaults the reader on all levels. Greene explores so many aspects and paradoxes of Christianity. He looks at the great beauty that can be found in sin. He looks at how love and hate can be so similar. Greene reveals how the priest's life has had great meaning even thought the priest may not realize it. Greene reveals man as living in a "Wasteland," and he also reveals the way to find meaning in it. The characterizations of all of the characters really carry the novel. There are so many insights that can be gained from reading about the priest, the lieutenant, and the mestizo. The Power and the Glory is truly a magnificent novel which should be taught and studied everywhere.

First published in England in 1940, The Power and the Glory deserves its reputation as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It comes close to being a perfectly realized work of art.

An unnamed priest is on the run in a revolutionary Mexican state that has outlawed the Catholic religion. All the other priests have fled, been shot, or forced to renounce their faith. The last practicing priest is hardly an exemplar of the breed; he's overly fond of brandy, and has fathered a daughter by a woman from his last parish. Feverish, shabby, and scared for his life, he forces himself to hear confession and dole out the host to the spiritually ravenous peasants he encounters in his wanderings.

As the priest wanders the state, he experiences a stripping away of his past identity. First to go are his dignity and social standing as a pampered parish priest. He misplaces his bible and over time loses the other ritual paraphernalia of his vocation. His shoes, pants and shirts wear out. He's constantly hungry, at one point fighting a crippled dog for a bone with a little meat left on it. Because his very presence brings danger to the villagers he's trying to serve, he can no longer take pride in the high price he pays for being God's remaining messenger. He realizes that martyrs aren't made from men like him. In the end, even the hope of final absolution and God's mercy are closed to him. Greene forces us to consider the following question: if you take away all that normally props up the sense of self, what's left that sustains us?

What the priest receives at his lowest points are the twin gifts of freedom and compassion. Locked in a crowded jail cell (in one of the great scenes in English literature), he realizes that he has nothing left to lose. The dogma he had been clinging to melts away, and his heart swells with compassion for the undesirables who surround him. Without illusion, he sees the particulars of his surroundings with new clarity. And he realizes that "when you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity." The fallen priest does what Jesus did: he goes so deeply into his humanity that he transcends it. Through suffering, he achieves in his fallen state the miracle and the mystery that eluded him when he adhered to the strict teachings of his faith.

The priest's nemesis is a soldier who is tasked to track him down. This unnamed Lieutenant feels a fierce, abstract love for his countrymen, even though he's willing to take and shoot hostages from the villages he suspects of sheltering the priest. The Lieutenant is determined to stamp out all vestiges of Catholicism in the state because he sees the church as complicit with the large landowners in oppressing his poor countrymen. He wants to give them real bread, and is enraged by their perverse insistence on receiving the ritual host that symbolizes the body of Christ. He's an intriguing character, a man filled with love that's fueled by hate. By the end of the book he begins to understand that even if he achieves his goals in furthering the revolution, personal peace will elude him.

By the evidence of his writing, Graham Greene was extraordinarily clear-eyed about humanity and decidedly secular in his personal behavior. Why was he obsessed with the rigid dogma of Catholicism, to which he converted as a young man, and why do so many of his major novels deal with worldly men tormented by their religious faith? His novels and autobiography provide some clues. Greene seemed to view life as a dark and painful progression - one reason he wrote with such insightful particularity about rural Mexico. He used Catholicism the way people use Elavil, Paxil or Zoloft, to keep at bay the despair that comes from feeling the human condition too intensely. At the social level, he distrusted man's ability, absent God, to make clear the human mystery and to relieve the sources of human suffering. He would have agreed with Kant that "out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, no straight thing can be built."

His faith helped him as a writer as well, providing a counterpoint to his keen reporter's eye and elevating the dilemmas of his characters to a higher moral plane. Catholicism, used as the argument for faith in the universal struggle between faith and unbelief, put a tension and a tensile strength into Greene's novels that would have been missing otherwise. In some of his other Catholic-themed novels (A Burnt-Out Case, The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair), the tension between faith and unbelief sometimes feels grafted on to the plot. In the Power and the Glory, these warring elements are beautifully, seamlessly fused in the person of the priest and the battered Mexican state through which he wanders. Which is, perhaps, the major reason this book is considered his masterpiece.

Although Greene needed faith, he needed even more to reveal the truth of the world as he saw it, which is why he didn't use his gifts to become a great Catholic apologist, becoming instead one of the greatest English-speaking novelists.

A lone man, known as the whiskey priest, is the last practicing priest remaining in a Mexican state comparable to Tabasco (where, in the 1920s and 1930s, a fierce persecution of Catholics and their priests actually took place). The governor has issued strict orders that he is to be captured and killed. Another priest, Father Jose, still lives in the same state, but as a failed priest (married, no longer saying Masses or hearing confessions or even praying in public), he is allowed to remain as an example to the people of how weak the priests' faith truly is. According to the government, they are pariahs, sucking a few pesos out of the poor and giving nothing in return except vague promises of a better future after death.

Graham Greene's extraordinary, unforgettable THE POWER AND THE GLORY presents a haunting and harrowing tale of a manhunt for a tortured soul. As the book opens, the priest has already lost his church, his parish, and most of his priestly possessions other than what he can carry in an attaché case. Hunted at every turn, the nameless priest desires escape to another Mexican state, but his own sense of pride in being the hunted last priest keeps him from taking the steps that would free him. He denies that he is either a hero or a martyr ("I don't think martyrs are like this," he giggles), yet he cannot bring himself to leave. He knows that capture and death are inevitable, but at each call for his priestly ministrations, he responds regardless of the risk or personal consequences. Greene follows the priest in his downward spiral - he loses his attaché case, he trades his decent clothes for those of a peasant, he gives up the donkey on which he traversed the countryside, and he suffers the guilt of knowing that others have died because he has not surrendered himself. The priest harbors his own sins, from pride and pity to engaging in sexual intercourse with a woman that resulted in a child, Brigitta. Of course, there is no second priest to hear his confession, so the whiskey priest faces the prospect of death without forgiveness for his mortal sin.

Greene's whiskey priest is a loosely disguised Christ figure. He travels the countryside on a donkey, gives up his worldly possessions, acquires a mestizo antagonist who becomes his personal Judas, suffers through a "wine scene" (not quite the wedding at Canaan) that is as sad and tragic as anything I've ever read by any author, and is ultimately captured by a Pilate-like police lieutenant who tries to befriend and reason with him before having him executed.

As always, Greene's prose captures in succinct bites the moment and the place, the sights and sounds of poverty, the scent of decay, the air of desperation and despair. "Memory drained out of him in the heat." "The vulture moved a little, like the black hand of a clock." "He sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay." "Black-beetles exploded against the wall like crackers." "Heat stood in the room like an enemy." "His boots ground peace into the floor." "He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room." "The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit." The examples are too numerous to list, yet their cumulative effect is one of immense descriptive power wielded with remarkable literary economy. His writing is eminently readable, like a thriller or a detective story, yet strikingly deep and brilliantly phrased, taking the reader deep into the heart and soul of a tragically self-doubting man.

Graham Greene converted to Catholicism at the age of 22, in 1926, but he writes about his adopted religion with all the fervor and doubt and insight of a lifelong practitioner. Along with THE HEART OF THE MATTER, THE POWER AND THE GLORY is a literary classic, a novel that delves into a man's religious core, explores his anxieties and doubts, and holds his failings up to the brightest of lights for inspection. At the same time, he creates a failed human for whom we cannot help empathizing and ultimately mourning, and in whom we can most certainly find aspects of ourselves.

No, he's not a gunslinger, he's one of the most unforgettable characters in literature. It's a story about good and evil without a single false note of sentimentality. Dostoevsky would have loved it. The humor is macabre, ironic, and serves as a great counterpoint to the action. Too many instances to mention, though the passage where a mother reads a sanitized version of the suffering of the Ever So Brave Saints to her child, while a real martyr is being led to the firing squad is outstanding.

The setting is Mexico in the 30's when Christianity was outlawed. The Mexican revolution which began in 1910 and wound down by the 40's claimed over one million civilians murdered by both sides. Or, to be more accurate, by every side; since there were lots of armed bands of 'patriots' willing to shoot or torture whoever disagreed with them.

Into this mayhem of chaos Greene sets a priest, the last in his province, who is fleeing incognito trying desperately to reach the border.

In another twist of irony, Greene's novel was privately condemned by The Vatican curia. (A pubic denunciation would have given him publicity. ) The curia's objection being that the priest is a sinner (Yeah --So?) Greene later recounted how he was summoned to Westminster where a very embarassed cardinal read him the letter of condemnation. Embarassed because he knew what it took some time for the curia to discover, that this is one of the greatest novels of the century.

Granted the "Whiskey Priest" as he is called, is hardly a heroic figure. His moniker comes from tipping the bottle much too frequently. He's also fathered an illegitimate child who hates him, and whose love he wants more than anything in the world. He's a fairly nice inoffensive guy who likes to do sleight of hand tricks to amuse his friends, enjoys prestige and creature comforts, "The Whiskey Priest" is a bit of a weakling and a coward.

In other words, he could have gone out on double dates with St. Peter. . .

And, like his famous predecessor, because he is a priest, his office overwhelms all his weaknesses. After he makes his escape and finds himself drifting into a respectable torpor, he meets a 'Judas' and thanks God that he must go back, even if it means his death.

A remarkable tale of reluctant heroism.

Most Christian novelists aren't out to convert, not to the same extent that random lunatics on streetcorners are, but it's figures like Greene and Flannery O'Connor who have made the best argument, to me, for the validity of the religious life. It's best expressed in a work of art because it's so fragile and abstract. Which is not to say that 'The Power and the Glory' is some kind of one-track propoganda pamphlet; just the opposite. It depicts a complex reality in which the idea of God keeps re-emerging, as the only answer to the bizzare problems the characters are faced with; Greene's strength, and the strength of most great authors, is that they don't have to manipulate reality to get their characters to say what they want them to say. The vision of sickness and longing, ruin and folly; everything somehow points in one direction. I read that Greene claimed this novel to be 'written to a thesis,' and even though it's so much more complex than morality plays like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, I see that.

The story is a cruel, tragic tale, imbued on several levels with chronic suffering and guilt. Greene travelled in Mexico in the 1930s, a miserable journey, chronicled in his travelogue 'The Lawless Roads'. During his travels, he found the majority of the provinces in Mexico to be crooked, and anti clerical. In the post 1910 Revolutionary era, under the presidency of Plutarco Elias Calles, anti clerical measures were adapted and organized religion banned. Calles believed that the Catholic Church was responsible for spreading superstition, priests were greedy and corrupt. Many of them were hunted down and shot. Others fled.

'The Power and the Glory' is based on a fictional version of one such priest, the nameless 'whisky priest', the only one left in his province who continues to practice his priestly duties under the constant threat of capture and execution. Unlike Jesus, however, the priest is an imperfect man. He drinks excessively, he commits adultery. And, perhaps most poignantly towards the end of the novel, he declares that it was pride rather than innate spiritual kindness that compelled him to bloody mindedly remain in the province.

Despite all of this, however, the priest is portrayed as a hero. For all his faults, he continues to practice religion during the worst of times.

The portrayal of Mexico in this novel is the perfect backdrop to the priest's plight. The tone is bleak and gloomy. Vultures, snakes, hyenas, beetles and sharks lurk ominously near the action. Fever is rife, sweltering heat is everywhere, as is thirst, poverty, decay and degredation.

The ultimate message of 'The Power and the Glory', however, is optimistic. The priest, although he does not realise it, has, through his actions, enabled the church to survive. He realises that he has fallen well short of what he considers to be the only thing that is worthy - to live the life of a saint. But in fact he is a saint, albeit a flawed one. It is he, and he alone during this time that enables the glory of the Church to prevail against the repressive power of the Government.

Incidentally, 'The Power and the Glory' was published in 1940. The Vatican wrote to Greene, condemning the novel and asking for revisions, in 1953 leading Evelyn Waugh to utter his famous reply 'They have taken fourteen years to write their first letter. You should take fourteen years to answer it'.

Sadly, Greene was shut out of winning the Nobel after P&G because a single judge on the selection committee bore him an old political grudge and swore that the novelist would "never win while I'm alive." Greene's ability to explore the largest of human themes through the medium of his unforgettably fallible characters is never better than here. And the crystalline prose ain't bad either.

Great fiction offers readers windows into the shortcomings of humanity and in this venture, Graham Greene stands as one of the 20th century's great exemplars. Yet of this profile author's work, The Power and the Glory stands out for its excellence.

A convert to Catholicism, Greene wrote a number of novels in which his faith played a central role. However, it is a testament to his insight that he saw religion not as a path to human perfection, but rather a way to understand and accept human frailty. The Power and the Glory follows an unnamed "Whiskey Priest," in a southern Mexican state following the revolution. Catholic practice is outlawed. Priests must either marry or face a firing squad. The protagonist, a drunkard and wallower in self pity, flees from the authorities, all the while musing about the absurdity that if they catch him he will likely be canonized a martyr.

The nemesis to this flawed priest, a patriotic zealous lieutenant who sees faith as an instrument of persecution, also stands out as a character both complex and compelling. To his great credit, Greene never offers pat resolutions or easy answers. Rather readers must face grim reality and understand that man's state remains one of perpetual imperfection.

Is there a truer plot- one that strikes closer to home - then a human being struggling between what he thinks is moraly right or wrong? We, like the whisky priest, wander through life from village to village afraid we will be caught by some authority who will condemn our actions. Eventually, we come to grips with what we are doing and we decide whether our action is worthy of pursuing till death. Sometimes it is, like the whisky priest decided his action was, sometimes it is not. However, we all hope that some great authority will see our action for what it is, release us, and punish the truly guilty man instead. Graham Greene wrote about life in general, not just one man's life.