La Puissance et la Gloire

I was lucky enough to spot a copy of Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory on a church charity stall in Tavistock, Devon. This is my 1940s read for the Goodreads / Bookcrossing Decade Challenge.

The Power And The Glory is set in Mexico, in a region where Christianity has been banned and the Catholic population forced to continue their worship in secret. Priests are hunted down and those few who have not abandoned their flocks completely must hide away, travel in disguise and lead mass by night in barns without the traditional tools of their trade. Our hero is a sorry excuse for a priest. An alcoholic 'whiskey priest' who has fathered a child outside of marriage, he is also the last remaining free priest and we see the closing noose through his eyes as the authorities, aware of his continued religious practice, slowly get nearer and nearer.

I love Greene's sense of pace and how he managed to fluctuate tension keeping me nervously page-turning throughout. Although this novel is now seventy-five years old its language and writing didn't feel at all dated. Greene's detailed descriptions of the Mexican people and landscapes allow for vivid imaginings but never get bog down the story and we get to meet some wonderfully nuanced characters. There are powerful questions asked of the reader - if your beliefs were banned, would you quietly acquiesce or fight back? What human cost is too much? Should others pay on your behalf? - and these can be applied as much to ethical and social beliefs as to religious ones.

A world-weary sense of inevitability hangs around the edges of the book, especially as the 'whiskey priest' begins to tire of life on the run, and Greene seems to have perfectly understood the stress of his protagonist's situation. The Power And The Glory isn't an easy read and offers different levels of interest depending on how deeply the reader wants to engage with the story. It's certainly a story that kept me thinking for a long time after I had finished it.