“The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene
I am in 3 book groups, and moderate one of them, which means I get to pick the books. We read books with themes of myth and religion, mostly fiction, since I love stories, and find they give interesting pathways to understanding truth. The group celebrates its third anniversary this month with our discussion this weekend of Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory.
I’d not read this yet, though I enjoyed both the novel and the movie of Greene’s The End of the Affair, and The Third Man, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, is perhaps my favorite movie. It’s the tale of a whisky priest (spelled whisky in the book but whiskey on the back cover), an alcoholic on the run from the communist police who will kill him. It’s a beautifully written, emotionally rich portrait of a time and place, along with a deeply conflicted, oh-so-human and yet always striving toward the divine. He is running away, but also running towards, and story proceeds in chunks of time that reflect his bumpy journey. It begins with one person he encounters, and is told in stories of the others as he goes. It’s about him, but also about them, so really, about all of us.
Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr Tench went on across the plaza.
I loved this, and look forward to discussing it with our group this weekend.