the power and the glory [greene]

The whisky priest feels like a definitive Greene trope, even if you’ve never read Greene. Catholic angst. Addiction. The struggle. 

It’s a hard to put a finger on Greene. Was he conservative or radical? Was he establishment or anti-establishment? On the one hand  he carved out a role as a celebrated British man of letters. He’s not an outsider like Lowry, for example. On the other, his themes and interests are decidedly internationalist. As though the British shores were too suffocating and he, like Lowry, had to swim away in order to find the stories that mattered, or find a context within which he felt as though he could tell the stories he wanted to tell. 

The Power and the Glory finds him in deepest, darkest Mexico, at the time of the repression of the priests, following the Calles law. The book follows a downtrodden priest as he tries to escape, constantly finding himself held back by the pull of his own conscience. Greene transforms the priest into a minor saint, with a coda showing a child’s veneration of the fallen hero. It’s a novel which feels both brilliantly constructed and yet dry, slightly brittle. The author’s eye always appears to be outside, looking in, rather than inside looking out. We sympathise with the priest but we never empathise with him. You sense that in so many ways Greene is using the character of the priest to articulate his own struggles as a believer; yet it also feels as though the author is using his narrative as a framing device which allows him to maintain a distance, to not engage.

It’s a curious, double-edged approach. Greene’s skill as a novelist is not in doubt. He maintains an alien story as it unfolds towards its seemingly inevitable grim conclusion. The skill is admirable; the power undeniable; but the passion feels as though it’s kept at arm’s length; the glory is evanescent, opaque.