The Bookworm: The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. 222 pages. Penguin Books. 1940.

“I’ve told lies, I haven’t fasted in Lent for I don’t know how many years. Once I had two women — I’ll tell you what I did…” He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part — a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession — Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent new vice: the animals knew as much.

A special thanks goes to Tom of Churchill’s Cigar. He gave me The Power and the Glory as a Christmas gift when I was back in IC for the holidays. It was a case of a Brit giving the gift of Brit lit. Had one of his book not been given to me, I may have never read Graham Green, which, I realize now, would have been shameful for a bookworm like me.

The Power and the Glory tells the story of “the whiskey priest,” a Catholic priest who has been hiding from authorities for years. The unnamed Mexican state where the story is set has apparently been taken over by anti-clerical communists, who are persecuting and executing clerics. It’s something that actually happened in the wake of Mexico’s 1917 constitution, and no doubt proved propulsive in the book’s writing. As the only practicing clergyman in the state, the whiskey priest continues with his religious duties as best he can, serving those who’ve kept the faith as he hops from village to village, house to house, to avoid capture. Not only does the whiskey priest struggle to elude capture, he wrestles with his own shortcomings as a religious figure and man.

The backdrop and subject are, from what I’ve read, typical for Greene. He was an interesting guy. Here’s a biological statement printed in The Nation:

A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name just a few.

Not to take anything away from him and his significance in the tradition of English literature, but The Power and the Glory made me think of Greene as the English Steinbeck. The setting of desperation and struggle, the carefully crafted plot twists, and the subtle sense of impending doom are comparable to those in The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and In Dubious Battle. Just as there is a “Steinbeck Country,” there’s also a “Greeneland.” At times, The Power and the Glory elicited from me those super corny reactions some people have when they watch movies. “Don’t do it!” “Run!” “Don’t trust him!” Though I didn’t say them out loud, I was screaming them on the inside, something I’ve often done when reading Steinbeck.

Though somewhat grandiloquent in that British way, the writing was powerful and beautiful. The narration was a kind of flexible third person that focused mainly on the priest, but was omniscient enough to float through the perspectives of other characters, something I didn’t care for. I’ll admit it did allow Greene to jump from location to location and weave in the intricacies of the story, but I wish he had limited the number of characters whom he told the story through. Specifically, there were three characters or set of characters that got the narration but played very minor, almost insignificant, parts.

Cool new words I learned: All descriptions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Manichaean: “of or characterized by dualistic contrast or conflict between opposites.” Pedant (variant of “pedantries”): “a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.” Inveigh: “speak or write about (something) with great hostility.” Garrulous: “excessively talkative, esp. on trivial matters.” Carious: “(of bones or teeth) decayed.” Prometheus: “a demigod, one of the Titans, who was worshiped by craftsmen. When Zeus hid fire from man, Prometheus stole it by trickery and returned it to earth. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle fed each day on his liver, which grew again each night; he was rescued by Hercules.” Fronton: “a building where pelota or jai alai is played.” Darn: “mend (knitted material or a hole in this) by weaving yarn across the hole with a needle.”