None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, ostensibly for love, and spent the next six decades being productively punished for it. The Power and the Glory, published in 1940 and based on his 1938 trip to anticlerical Mexico, is the bill that conversion sent him.
A nameless, rum-soaked, hollow-faced priest wanders the banana plantations and malaria swamps of a Mexican state where the government has abolished God by decree. Every other priest has married, recanted, or been shot. This one runs, badly, carrying a battered attaché case, a bottle when he can find one, and a daughter he fathered in a single act of weakness with a woman named Maria.
The daughter is named Brigitta, and she stares at him with such cold clarity that she is more terrifying than any policeman. He says Mass in barns with contraband wine. He baptizes children with whatever water the heat has left behind. He is the worst possible advertisement for his own faith.
Hunting him is the lieutenant, a lean, boot-polished idealist who grew up watching the Church collect pesos from the starving in exchange for paradise futures. He takes hostages from villages and rides through the swamps with his pistol holster winking in the sun hunting for the last Padre. Greene gives the lieutenant all the best secular arguments.
The priest is shadowed, among others, by a yellow-toothed mestizo with feverish eyes. He is sheltered, briefly, by a twelve-year-old English girl named Coral Fellows, who lives on a banana plantation with her vague father and her ailing mother. She is ten years old in competence and a hundred in composure.
This is undeniably a theological book dressed in a thriller's clothing. Grace operates entirely below the threshold of personal merit. The priest is vain, cowardly, compromised, and alcoholic. He is also indispensable. The sacraments he performs in mud-floored huts carry their full weight regardless of the moral condition of the man performing them.
The Mexico of this book is a theological storm. Buzzards perform their civic duties above every plaza, the heat presses down like a hand on the back of the neck, armed men lurk at every river crossing, and churches are converted into government offices, their stained glass sold off to dentists.
Mr. Tench, the melancholy English dentist who opens and closes the book like a pair of brackets, has a Madonna looking out through his mosquito wire at a yard full of turkeys. Sacred and profane have always found a way to room together.
The prose is stripped and exact, the pity is controlled, the irony shoots in both directions simultaneously. A reader who finds institutional religion ridiculous will find this book maddening. A reader who finds it sublime will find this book maddening. I think that Greene aimed for exactly that crossfire.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, ostensibly for love, and spent the next six decades being productively punished for it. The Power and the Glory, published in 1940 and based on his 1938 trip to anticlerical Mexico, is the bill that conversion sent him.
A nameless, rum-soaked, hollow-faced priest wanders the banana plantations and malaria swamps of a Mexican state where the government has abolished God by decree. Every other priest has married, recanted, or been shot. This one runs, badly, carrying a battered attaché case, a bottle when he can find one, and a daughter he fathered in a single act of weakness with a woman named Maria.
The daughter is named Brigitta, and she stares at him with such cold clarity that she is more terrifying than any policeman. He says Mass in barns with contraband wine. He baptizes children with whatever water the heat has left behind. He is the worst possible advertisement for his own faith.
Hunting him is the lieutenant, a lean, boot-polished idealist who grew up watching the Church collect pesos from the starving in exchange for paradise futures. He takes hostages from villages and rides through the swamps with his pistol holster winking in the sun hunting for the last Padre. Greene gives the lieutenant all the best secular arguments.
The priest is shadowed, among others, by a yellow-toothed mestizo with feverish eyes. He is sheltered, briefly, by a twelve-year-old English girl named Coral Fellows, who lives on a banana plantation with her vague father and her ailing mother. She is ten years old in competence and a hundred in composure.
This is undeniably a theological book dressed in a thriller's clothing. Grace operates entirely below the threshold of personal merit. The priest is vain, cowardly, compromised, and alcoholic. He is also indispensable. The sacraments he performs in mud-floored huts carry their full weight regardless of the moral condition of the man performing them.
The Mexico of this book is a theological storm. Buzzards perform their civic duties above every plaza, the heat presses down like a hand on the back of the neck, armed men lurk at every river crossing, and churches are converted into government offices, their stained glass sold off to dentists.
Mr. Tench, the melancholy English dentist who opens and closes the book like a pair of brackets, has a Madonna looking out through his mosquito wire at a yard full of turkeys. Sacred and profane have always found a way to room together.
The prose is stripped and exact, the pity is controlled, the irony shoots in both directions simultaneously. A reader who finds institutional religion ridiculous will find this book maddening. A reader who finds it sublime will find this book maddening. I think that Greene aimed for exactly that crossfire.
❤️ 🇮🇱