Book Review: The Power and the Glory

I had been to Mexico for five weeks. I burdened friends, relatives and, most unreasonably, colleagues with a travel diary that ran to several thousand words. One of my colleagues, R had his revenge by lending me his copy of The Power and the Glory, Greene’s famous novel set in a fictitious Mexican State, never identified but clearly intended to be Tabasco which experienced strong anti-clericalism under the government of Tomas Garrido Canabal who was governor from 1922 to 1935.

Greene converted to Catholicism when he was 22 in 1926 and he was commissioned to and did visit Tabasco in 1938 when Garrido had gone to a federal job and had appointed Aureo L Calles to succeed him as governor.

The Power and the Glory is the story of a priest who has remained in the State despite the suppression and who ministers to his people while on the run and while threatened with execution if he is caught.

Greene is interested in the nature of goodness and eschews a traditional view. The priest who, like the State, is never named, is an alcoholic, a “whisky priest”, and has fathered a child. He considers himself a sinner and a bad priest, unworthy to carry out the role that continues to befall him, and blames himself as guilty of pride for failing to escape to a safer and more comfortable role across the State border. He believes his sin of fornication is aggravated by his love for the child who is the product of the relationship and that he is unable to properly repent.

At the same time, the priest rejects “piousness” in others and finds the sins of those who come to confession to be, essentially, a product of the human condition and unimportant in the broader context.

Though sketched only in a roundabout way, the novel’s verdict on the wayward priest is that his sins of commission and omission are of little importance compared to his service and self-sacrifice and he is to be truly counted among the “saints”.

The theme that rises, like brandy fumes, from the life and times of the whisky priest, is that our goodness, when we achieve it, is wrapped around with normal human frailties. If we expect our saints to look and behave like saints, we will miss most of what is good in the people we know and love. The other side of the same proposition is that human failings are part of our human condition and we should not place too much importance on our own “sins” or those of others. Other things may be more important in final accountings.

The other dominant character is the equally unnamed Lieutenant, who has taken upon himself responsibility to locate and cause the execution of the whisky priest even to the extent of taking innocent hostages from the villages and executing them, if and when it is discovered that village has harboured the priest.

Greene uses the persuasive technique of portraying the Lieutenant, the anti-hero of the novel, with strong ideals, sophistication, and a plausible credo by which he acts. He is an honourable persecutor and his interactions with the priest, in particular, rise almost to nobility while the Lieutenant, himself, does not, until the very end and in an understated way, waver from the persecutory course upon which he is set.

I first met this technique in the later written and also brilliant La Silence de la Mer by Vercors, a piece of French Underground propaganda, where the anti-hero is a Nazi billet is portrayed as both a good man and a passionate believer in the goodness of Nazism. The disillusionment of the sympathetically drawn believer in false ideals is always a powerful motif.

The Power and the Glory was chosen by Time magazine in 2005 as among the best hundred books written in English since 1923. Seven years later and over seventy years since it was published, that accolade seems well-deserved.

R’s revenge turned into a great favour. I came to read one of the great English novels while learning a little more about Mexico, another of the world’s great mysteries.