The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)
by Graham Greene
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Book Summary Information
Author: Graham GreeneIntroduction: John Updike
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-25
ISBN: 0142437301
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780142437308
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: " . . . the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death . . . "
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the important things to do when reading any work of literature is to ask, either as you move along or upon completion of the work, why the title may have been chosen. This often helps the reader to tie the work together. Sometimes this answer is easy, as when the title simply reflects the main character's name or some obvious theme in the book. In Graham Greene's masterful work The Power and the Glory, the answer to this question is not nearly so obvious. How can a book have such a title when its pages lead the reader, from beginning to end, through the squalor and poverty, the ignorance and barbarity of the anti-clerical oppression in Mexico: through the filthy streets, shacks laden with bugs, dysentery, toothaches, firing squads and despair? The ugliness is relentless, and if there is any power and glory to be found, one has to search hard for it.
The story centers on a hunted animal, also a Catholic priest. He is the last priest known in the area who has not either fled or submitted to the anti-catholic laws, and the governor in this Mexican state wants him captured. There is no doubt that if he is found, his fate will be like that of many others--death before a firing squad. He is pursued by a persistent lieutenant, a man whose anti-clerical extremism is rooted in his childhood experiences of hypocrisy in the Church. He believes that the world will see justice only by destroying what he sees as a false faith that deludes the people. For him, the priest is merely a symbol of this oppressive system, and throughout most of the book--until he finally comes face to face with him--he fails to see the priest even as a fellow man.
This manhunt gives the work its constant tension, as the priest confronts his very natural fears and flees from village to village interacting with the faithful, many of whom have not seen a priest in years. The authorities decide that in order to find him, they will round up hostages from the villages in which they think he might be hiding. These villagers are to be shot one by one, in an effort to force the people to betray him. They suffer in silence; the richness and simplicity of their faith is striking and moving. They hunger not only on account of Mexico's crushing poverty; they hunger for the "Body of God," the little Host, the one great hope in their miserable condition, a hope that depends upon a Catholic priest, however unworthy--even this "whiskey priest," as he is known for his love of the bottle. No persecution and no law can take away this relentless desire the peasants have for their God. The Church may physically be driven out, but it leaves a void in the human heart that nothing else can fill.
The fleeing priest is therefore burdened with the agonizing knowledge that the faithful are dying for him--that his capture would put an end to this misery--yet he has a duty to carry on. He fails to recognize the depth of his own faith and the deep sense he has of his duty to others, to which he is always true. He has been driven from a life of comfort and respectability to the depths of agony and shame. All the while, the reader is permitted to stand back and watch, to contrast the man with his own judgment of himself. The work opens as the disguised priest prepares to escape the area by boat but is called away to help a child's sick mother. It comes to a close with a parallel act that likewise pits his sense of duty against his best interest as he is brought back to the dangerous area he had fled in order to offer confession to a dying murderer. After the priest's own despair, he has learned true love, and he sees value even in the life of one so vile.
Everything that made him what he was before the persecution, a priest with soft hands that the women and children kissed in deference, his possessions, his voice of authority and his sense of self-worth--all of this is gone. He is stripped, much like Christ, of everything he has. As he is hunted, he is forced to leave behind even his little Mass kit, a treasured gift from his former parishioners. He saves only one small shred of paper as a reminder of his past; even the clothes he wears are not his own. The people in the village where he once ministered are frightened when he comes. He comes unto his own, but his own receive him not, at least not willingly, because they are afraid.
He confronts his own daughter, who was conceived in a lustful moment with a local village woman some years before, and she too rejects him. Here again he realizes his duty, this time as a father, and weeps for his lost child, one whose soul is bitter and already sadly lost, even in her youth. She has never even developed the "habit of piety," which is referenced several times in the book as the act, so to speak, of "going through the motions" of religion. The priest, for the most part, has lost this habit, except for his unrelenting sense of duty. Toward the end of the work, he calls for the one other priest in the area, Padre Jose, to hear his confession, a priest who surrendered to forced marriage and the accompanying scandal in order to avoid being shot. The cowardly cleric refuses to hear the confession, and so the "whiskey priest" lacks even the sacrament of his forgiveness, spending the night alone, except for the companionship he has with a bottle of brandy. He is completely without human consolation or company, and he laments his unworthiness. He wishes that God had sent the people a real saint and not a wretch like him--even as all human considerations, even his fear of pain, fade away in his desire for God.
The reader's principal task then is one that the student of philosophy will, at least in theory, be familiar with--to determine what is left of the essence when these accidents are peeled away, one by one. As the little old frail shell-of-a-man stands before his enemies, unable even to chant the motto of the Mexican martyrs, Vivo Christo Rey, what remains of him? And what is there that is powerful or glorious in this little hell-like spot in the universe? While it may seem that Greene is ridiculing the "habit of piety" as a mere guise of true religion, it becomes clear as the work goes on that this "habit" is a foundation upon which saints and even martyrs may be built, a habit that commands one to do his duty, even without giving the reason. Suffering gives this habit depth and new dimension; it builds upon it, but it does not destroy it.
The answer regarding the purpose of the title is hinted at in several places--including once almost half way through the work, just after the priest hears the confession of a fevered man who offers to guide him to a nearby village--but its full impact is not realized until the end. On the last page, in the last paragraph, the reader sees the one ray of hope for which, I believe, the entire work was written. It is present in one little gesture of a child, a little boy who throughout the work has been skeptical and bored by the almost inhumanly pious stories told to him by his mother, stories that seemed to him unbelievable. He is, in this sense, the very image of the antagonist lieutenant when he was young. The real and present example of the hunted priest causes a change in the boy that represents a hope for all of Mexico--including the lieutenant--and which, I believe, explains the work's title. To know of it, you will need to travel the forests and villages of Mexico with this despairing and repenting drunkard and priest; you must see Christ kissed by Judas and crucified again.
The Power and the Glory, while perhaps not for everyone, is a gripping work that looks into the soul of a hunted man who is wounded by the realization of his own imperfection, a man whose faith begins as a "habit of piety" and later is forged in the cauldron of immense suffering into a profound experience of love that will move the reader. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for it.
Summary of The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)
In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.Introduction by John Updike
How does good spoil, and how can bad be redeemed? In his penetrating novel The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement through a priest and the people he encounters. In the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the Church, naming it a source of greed and debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and shot by firing squad--save one, the whisky priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana farmer, and a village woman he knew six years earlier. For a while, he is accompanied by a toothless man--whom he refers to as his Judas and does his best to ditch. Always, an adamant lieutenant is only a few hours behind, determined to liberate his country from the evils of the church.
On the verge of reaching a safer region, the whisky priest is repeatedly held back by his vocation, even though he no longer feels fit to perform his rites: "When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example?"
As his sins and dangers increase, the broken priest comes to confront the nature of piety and love. Still, when he is granted a reprieve, he feels himself sliding into the old arrogance, slipping it on like the black gloves he used to wear. Greene has drawn this man--and all he encounters--vividly and viscerally. He may have said The Power and the Glory was "written to a thesis," but this brilliant theological thriller has far more mysteries--and troubling ideals--than certainties. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland
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