I am nominally a Catholic. Once a month as a boy my mother dragged me to a town hall a few villages away, and to a gathering of perhaps ten people a priest would do the honours. It was neither the glamorous service nor glittering golden church that most people associate with Catholicism. In the back room there was a table for table football, but as I was the only child there, I never had a chance to play. I remember little about the services themselves. All that I do remember was a feeling of unease when it came time to make my confession to the man behind the window who apparently had become God. I do not think I’ve made one since.
I remember being surprised at boarding school when I was told I was a Catholic. I’d had no idea. This meant that I had to go to Mass, rather than the normal Sunday services. And dutifully I went, at least at first. Later, I found someone to sign the attendance sheet for me and stayed in bed. I realise now that however nominal that upbringing seems to be, it’s not something I should take for granted. Once, almost everyone knew the major stories of the bible and bits and pieces from the gospels. This is certainly no longer the case – that common reference network is fading rapidly from collective memory.
The Power and the Glory is a novel by Graham Greene, a writer who was Catholic himself. It’s the second of his that I’ve read after Brighton Rock, which I read back at school. Greene didn’t like the appellation “Catholic Novelist”, but The Power and the Glory centres on a Catholic priest in Mexico and it’s easy to see where people might have got the idea from.
Introduction to the Plot
The Power and the Glory centres on an unnamed “Whisky Priest”, Greene’s own coinage for a priest who is rather poor at following the rules of his profession. He neglects his fish on Fridays, has a penchant for brandy, and has fathered a child. In the unnamed state of Mexico where the story is set, the governor has introduced a policy of extreme religious repression and priests are either forced to marry and surrender their profession or else face the firing line. We first meet the priest waiting for a boat that will take him away, but he is forced to abandon the plan when a child comes, informing him that their mother is dying. The priest grumblingly decides to go to help, even though he knows he will miss the boat. “I am meant to miss it”, he says to an Englishman he meets at the port.
Without the boat, the priest’s options are limited. He travels around the small state, trying both to perform his duty and to escape. He’s vacillates between the two options. Especially once the antagonist of The Power and the Glory, the lieutenant, introduces a system where hostages are taken from each village, who are then shot whenever it turns out that they did not give the priest up when he passed through, it becomes hard to justify his decision to put others at risk. But the priest, for all his failings of character, knows that it is his duty to stay. He thinks:
“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?”
Suspense and Action
He stays, but with each day the challenge for him grows. At first villages welcome him, but by the time he reaches his old parish people have already turned cold. They receive him out of their own sense of duty, much more than from love. True to his talents elsewhere as a novelist of spies and action, Greene in The Power and Glory is able to write a story that has an excellent feeling of suspense and action throughout. I never knew what was going to happen next, but at the same time I constantly had the feeling that a net was closing in around our hero. Compared to many classics, The Power and the Glory is an exciting read as well as an interesting one.
A few times stand out, such as when the priest and a mestizo go together towards the priest’s home. The priest is certain the mestizo is only travelling with him to turn him in for sizeable monetary reward. But Greene keeps us guessing and unable to decide whether to believe the mestizo’s avowed Catholic faith or the priest’s own senses. Another time was when the police reached the priest’s parish just after he’d finished mass, leaving no time to flee. All of the townsfolk were lined up and asked to give away the priest, but their resolve holds and a hostage is taken instead.
The Lieutenant – an Enemy of the Faith
One thing I enjoyed about The Power and the Glory was the way Greene presents the lieutenant, the priest’s antagonist. Although he does introduce the hostage system, in other ways he and the priest are not so different. Both are driven by faith. But the lieutenant wants to destroy religious belief, so that people concentrate on the here and now. He wants to give people “the right to be happy in any way they chose”, but his methods ultimately end up restricting people.
All the same, he is himself a noble, virtuous man. He thinks it would be a triumph if he “could show [him]self superior on any point – whether of courage, truthfulness, justice”. He turns his hatred into a motivation for building up his character. Judging on that basis alone, the lieutenant is the better man. After a stint in prison the lieutenant even gives the (unrecognised) priest some money, forcing the latter to admit with astonishment “You’re a good man”. Unfortunately the ends the lieutenant aims for are undermined by the means he uses to try to reach them.
The Religious Mode – what makes The Power and the Glory a Catholic novel?
Every chapter in The Power and the Glory has a vulture somewhere in it. The great birds, hovering and waiting for us to die, are an obvious analogy for God, watching and waiting too. In The Power and the Glory we are presented with a world where God may well exist, and without bearing that in mind it is difficult to understand the priest’s actions. People die because of him – good people. He himself is no moral exemplar, so how can this be correct? Because he is a priest, and his duty is to help people to salvation of their souls, not their bodies. As the priest says, it doesn’t matter if he’s a coward – “I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same – and I can give him God’s pardon.” If we believe in the salvation of souls, we can accept the avoidable early deaths of bodies.
It is God who, the priest understands, is responsible for his continued survival and lucky escapes. “There was only one reason, surely, which would make Him refuse His peace – if there was any peace – that he could still be of us in saving a soul, his own or another’s”. In The Power and the Glory we are constantly faced with souls, hovering on the edge of damnation, including the priest’s own. However many people may die, so long as a few souls are saved, the sacrifice is worth it. It is a challenging idea for the unreligious, but without it it’s hard to see the priest as anyone other than a fool. I like that Greene focuses on the good of his characters. Images of faces and feet are all traditionally Christian and run through the whole book. They remind us that we’re all made in the image of Christ.
A Few Words on Style and Form
I’m not sure how much I’m a fan of Greene’s writing style. It’s very sparse, careful. The fact that he had a very methodical approach to writing is something you can feel. It gets the job done, no doubt, but I think it sometimes left emotions not as hard hitting as they ought to have been. And unlike Under the Volcano, another book I read recently which was set in Mexico, I didn’t really have much of a feel for the landscape of The Power and the Glory. There are moments of good imagery, though. For example, from the first chapter: “The vulture moved a little, like the black hand of a clock”.
Greene does make up for this with a good command of form – again, the evidence of careful planning and meticulousness. I liked the way that we are often seeing the priest from other eyes, showing how he changes externally as well as internally as the book progresses. I also liked the number of characters Greene includes. They were not all living and breathing, but they were all relatively fleshed out. The use of symbols and their development also made sense. What more can I say? Everything works as it needed to – the base that bears the story is sturdy enough.
Conclusion
The Power and the Glory is the first book by Graham Greene that I’ve read since I left school. It will not be my last. Although I’m not quite sure what I believe, it’s always important to see a different view of the world, and this is exactly what Greene provides in his novel. Whether the salvation of a single soul is worth more than the deaths of many, I’m not sure, but I’m glad someone is making a case for it. Too often it’s easy to forget the power and glory of the ideas that underpin religions. In The Power and the Glory Greene shows the dignity of faith, but beyond that he also reminds us of the dignity of everyone, whether atheist or faithful, child or adult. And whatever you believe, there’s always value in remembering that.
For more things on God, take a look at my post on rebellion against Him.