 "a rose stained by true love's blood" | 2009-04-25 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1R62W9KGC5RGX |
I found the Power and the Glory - a novel on the list of Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels - whilst perusing Amazon's Listmania. It's small yet powerful tome on the futility of human existence without ultimate truth. Through the tale of a broken-hearted, stubborn, perpetually self doubting and deprecating whiskey priest at odds with an Atheistic Lieutenant hell bent on ridding his state of the corruption of Catholicism, Greene explores the conflict between Christian claims and the corruption, pride and desolation of man's heart.
Through a tale set in a Mexican state where Catholic Priests are forced to renounce their religion or face certain death, Greene weaves a tapestry of tragedy, purposelessness, and sacrifice. Sentences such as "there was a sense of desolation everywhere, more of it than in the mountains because a lot of life had once existed here," which appear to describe landscape speak to another level: where the creation apart from men is good yet where in the hands of all men is corruped as absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Imagery first defined in Chapter 1 with the following sentence, "the girl whom Mr. Trench had spotted from the bank began to sing gently - a melancholy, sentimental, contended song about a rose which had been stained with true love's blood," returns throughout the novel, morphing from a seemingly surface level perhaps tried insight in many works to something unexpected, and entirely more profound. What is true love? Can there be true love without sacrifice? Was Jesus' radical call to love God in all trials and one's enemies as themselves nothing more than a a mere platitude? Or was it an insight into the deepest realities of the Universe?
Later in the novel he describes the self loathing protagonist as having "come to the very edge of time: soon there would be no tomorrow and no yesterday, just existence going on forever and ever." Grame Greene searches for the answer to the question of Ultimate Truth and whether it has been revealed to man - yet concealed by man's own pride - through this story coming perhaps up only to the edge of time. Yet time will always remain a chasm that only through death will we, in bondage within the confines of the human condition, ever truly know.
His dexterity in threading mood, ambiance, character portrait and light handed insight elevates the tale from a work of mere fiction to a timeless piece of art. An author I'm glad to have "discovered" and whose novels I'll continue to devour. |
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 ""When a man with a gun meets a man with a prayer....."" | 2009-02-21 |
| - Reviewed By kachhua2 |
The man with a prayer is a dead man.
Not many people would start off a review of a Graham Greene novel with a paraphrase from a Clint Eastwood movie, but I am just a drifter on the high plains of literature. This is no doubt a powerful novel with the same theme of man's relation to God that suffuses many of Greene's other works. In a Mexico where state control had broken down, local satraps carried out projects of their own, taking national policy to extremes. So, in Tabasco, a warlord decreed that all priests must be expelled, forced to marry, or killed; all churches would be closed or destroyed. A few priests dared to stay behind in secret, defying the tyrant, ministering to the suffering masses (or continuing to bilk them---from an atheistic point of view) The main character here is a priest, driven from pillar to post, hunted like a bandit (indeed he is paired with a gringo killer in terms of police priorities), riding a mule through the jungles and swamps, hiding out with reluctant villagers, fearing betrayal at every step, but never giving up. He recognizes that he is a sinner (alcoholic, father of a child) but though he is human, he is yet divine through his soaring spirit, which slowly emerges and arises through his fear. Whether Greene could really get inside a Mexican priest's head is another question. I'll leave it to Mexicans to decide. A cold-blooded police lieutenant hunts the priest, swearing to kill him. He too is human, not a cardboard baddie, he has hopes for the new generation who will never be subservient to the wiles of `the Church'. A couple minor English characters appear from time to time: though well-drawn, I felt they were superfluous in a parable-style tale like this. Pain and martyrdom, sacrifice, duty, contradiction and consistency---all these in God's name or in the name of no God, but Fate. The priest escapes to Chiapas, a more moderate state, but returns at the behest of a debased informer, knowing his certain doom full well, accepting his Fate (even though dreading it) like Christ. The police lieutenant understands the priest's humanity at the end, but carries out his duty. The power wins out, but the glory lives on. A great book which carries a lot of suspense within its pages.
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| "Literature at its best" | 2009-02-16 |
| - Reviewed By jkhvjlghcj |
I never read the book during my school years, as so many others have. So I picked it up recently, and started in. What a difference between literature, and what passes for literature now! Cars...movies...fiction...I thought I would never say it: they don't make them like they used to.
The Power and the Glory is a simple story, but so much more. There are many waves of reality occurring. The plot is simple, the characters are simple, and the end of the story seems inevitable. The tension between the unnamed priest and police lieutenant provides the voltage for the work. The priest is unable to see his faith, and the lieutenant unable to see his evil. They each are like an Everyman when it comes to faith, one seeking to maintain it despite human brokenness, the other rejecting it because of oppressive childhood experiences of the Church. This itself speaks to the modern person, who finds him/herself on one side or the other of the institutional Church.
In-between are the lateral characters of the mestizo, a patriot but also one like Judas, who betrays the whiskey priest (who knows it from the beginning), and Padre Jose, who has totally succumbed to the power of the State, given up his faith, and entered into a forced marriage. Other characters in the novel move between belief and non-belief.
The story moves at a normal pace. The descriptive words are laid out well. At least I felt the heat of the Mexican land. The players are all real, as is the shadow of the story in our time. The story is timeless, speaking to today as it did 70 years ago. The classic confronts us today.
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 "CONFUSING" | 2009-02-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3GZXXCK4BKUAN |
This was a reread after many years. I just finished Greene's letters which stimulated my interest. "Power" seems inconsistent with his growing agnosticism. Perhaps it was written when he was smitten with the majesty of the mother church.
He does not question the motivation of the "Whiskey Priest". Perhaps it is a statement about the dependence of Roman Catholics on the unbending
myths that have kept the church vital for all these centuries.
Even today (2009) we are faced with the never ending conflicts about dogma. Benedict seems torn.
The same question was raised by Evelyn Waugh in "Brideshead". No matter what we do, or feel, in the final analysis we end the same.
Perhaps the title " Power and Glory" tells it all.
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| "broader interpretation" | 2009-01-16 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1NWKVB9JPC79I |
| Having read through a number of other reviews here, I think that many people have missed the boat when it comes to their interpretations of Greene's meaning. The character who he focuses on at the end of the story is the cynical young boy, not the priest. Sure, the central character is the priest, but I believe that, by telling his individual story, Greene is really trying to tell the story of an entire lost, desolate people. Throughout the book, there seems no light, only hopelessness in this barren land. On the last page, hope is reborn when the young boy, who's been listening to his mother read about the martyrs only to enjoy the violence to this point, has a change of heart and comes to understand the truth of what these men have been persecuted for. |
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| "A David Attenborough of the literary world." | 2008-06-04 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2YXRT2XIJIO57 |
Like Mr. Attenborough, Graham Green has roamed the world. His interests were not primarily plants and animals, but representatives of the human species, often those profoundly flawed. His novels are set in Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and more. His characters play out their drama against these exotic backgrounds, the expatriates and the natives, and almost certainly it is an interaction between these groups that is a dynamo which drives the novel forward. I used to think that "The Quiet American," set in Vietnam, was his finest, but after re-reading "The Power and the Glory," I would rank them equally.
It is pre-World War II Mexico, anti-clerical forces are reigning, and therefore the agents of the Catholic Church are outside the law, often literally hunted, and if caught, executed. The two principal characters are reflected in each noun of the title, a police lieutenant who vows to bring in the last functioning priest in the province. This is the principal thread of dynamic tension that unifies the novel. There is a similar thread within the hunted priest himself. He is considered a "whiskey priest," with a fondness for brandy, and he has a daughter. Does he really want to escape his pursers, or does he believe his capture would be just punishment for his sins? It is a many-faceted issue that is used to explore his character.
Graham also populates his novel with numerous minor characters, mainly part of the human detritus that has washed up in this developmental backwater. There is an American dentist, barely surviving with his antique tools; a steamship captain, his wife and their precocious daughter; and a German-American couple who have opted for Mexico instead of submitting to conscription during WW I. There are also the natives, a "half-cast" who haunts the priest, and a touchingly stubborn Indian woman with her dead infant.
In reading Greene, and particularly such a novel on the Catholic Church, it is important to reflect that according to his biographers, Greene himself was both Catholic, and profoundly flawed. Along with the works of Carlos Fuentes, this is a quintessential book on Mexico, and therefore a vital read for all Americans in particular.
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