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The Power and the Glory Audio CD – Unabridged, February 1, 2011
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In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.
Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement in this penetrating novel set in 1930s Mexico during the era of Communist religious persecutions. As revolutionaries determine to stamp out the evils of the church through violence, the last Roman Catholic priest is on the lam, hunted by a police lieutenant. Despite his own sense of worthlessness--he is a heavy drinker and has fathered an illegitimate child--he is determined to continue to function as a priest until captured. He is contrasted with Padre José, a priest who has accepted marriage and embodies humiliation.
A Christian parable pitting God and religion against twentieth-century materialism, The Power and the Glory is considered by many, including the author himself, to be Greene's best work.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBlackstone Publishing
- Publication dateFebruary 1, 2011
- Dimensions5.2 x 1.1 x 5.7 inches
- ISBN-101441704108
- ISBN-13978-1441704108
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"As brilliantly written as it is magnificently conceived."
-- "Chicago Sun""Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature."
-- "John le Carré, #1 New York Times bestselling author""Greene has drawn this man--and all he encounters--vividly and viscerally...this brilliant theological thriller has far more mysteries--and troubling ideals--than certainties."
-- "Amazon.com""Greene's masterpiece."
-- "John Updike, Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author""The book should attract...not only those who read for diversion and excitement, but those, too, who read for the pleasure of superb writing and shrewd contriving of story."
-- "Chicago Daily Tribune"About the Author
Graham Greene (1904-1991) was an English novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. He was an ardent convert to Catholicism, and religious themes are at the root of much of his writing. He served with the Secret Intelligence Service during the Second World War. His novels are set in places in a state of seedy decay, and many of his locations, such as Vietnam in The Quiet American and Cuba in Our Man in Havana, became international crisis spots.
Bernard Mayes is a teacher, administrator, corporate executive, broadcaster, actor, dramatist, and former international commentator on US culture. He is best known for his readings of historical classics.
Product details
- Publisher : Blackstone Publishing; Unabridged edition (February 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1441704108
- ISBN-13 : 978-1441704108
- Item Weight : 8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 1.1 x 5.7 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,359,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,640 in Classic American Literature
- #21,596 in Books on CD
- #63,917 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Henry Graham Greene OM CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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An unnamed priest is on the run in a revolutionary Mexican state that has outlawed the Catholic religion. All the other priests have fled, been shot, or forced to renounce their faith. The last practicing priest is hardly an exemplar of the breed; he's overly fond of brandy, and has fathered a daughter by a woman from his last parish. Feverish, shabby, and scared for his life, he forces himself to hear confession and dole out the host to the spiritually ravenous peasants he encounters in his wanderings.
As the priest wanders the state, he experiences a stripping away of his past identity. First to go are his dignity and social standing as a pampered parish priest. He misplaces his bible and over time loses the other ritual paraphernalia of his vocation. His shoes, pants and shirts wear out. He's constantly hungry, at one point fighting a crippled dog for a bone with a little meat left on it. Because his very presence brings danger to the villagers he's trying to serve, he can no longer take pride in the high price he pays for being God's remaining messenger. He realizes that martyrs aren't made from men like him. In the end, even the hope of final absolution and God's mercy are closed to him. Greene forces us to consider the following question: if you take away all that normally props up the sense of self, what's left that sustains us?
What the priest receives at his lowest points are the twin gifts of freedom and compassion. Locked in a crowded jail cell (in one of the great scenes in English literature), he realizes that he has nothing left to lose. The dogma he had been clinging to melts away, and his heart swells with compassion for the undesirables who surround him. Without illusion, he sees the particulars of his surroundings with new clarity. And he realizes that "when you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity." The fallen priest does what Jesus did: he goes so deeply into his humanity that he transcends it. Through suffering, he achieves in his fallen state the miracle and the mystery that eluded him when he adhered to the strict teachings of his faith.
The priest's nemesis is a soldier who is tasked to track him down. This unnamed Lieutenant feels a fierce, abstract love for his countrymen, even though he's willing to take and shoot hostages from the villages he suspects of sheltering the priest. The Lieutenant is determined to stamp out all vestiges of Catholicism in the state because he sees the church as complicit with the large landowners in oppressing his poor countrymen. He wants to give them real bread, and is enraged by their perverse insistence on receiving the ritual host that symbolizes the body of Christ. He's an intriguing character, a man filled with love that's fueled by hate. By the end of the book he begins to understand that even if he achieves his goals in furthering the revolution, personal peace will elude him.
By the evidence of his writing, Graham Greene was extraordinarily clear-eyed about humanity and decidedly secular in his personal behavior. Why was he obsessed with the rigid dogma of Catholicism, to which he converted as a young man, and why do so many of his major novels deal with worldly men tormented by their religious faith? His novels and autobiography provide some clues. Greene seemed to view life as a dark and painful progression - one reason he wrote with such insightful particularity about rural Mexico. He used Catholicism the way people use Elavil, Paxil or Zoloft, to keep at bay the despair that comes from feeling the human condition too intensely. At the social level, he distrusted man's ability, absent God, to make clear the human mystery and to relieve the sources of human suffering. He would have agreed with Kant that "out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, no straight thing can be built."
His faith helped him as a writer as well, providing a counterpoint to his keen reporter's eye and elevating the dilemmas of his characters to a higher moral plane. Catholicism, used as the argument for faith in the universal struggle between faith and unbelief, put a tension and a tensile strength into Greene's novels that would have been missing otherwise. In some of his other Catholic-themed novels (A Burnt-Out Case, The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair), the tension between faith and unbelief sometimes feels grafted on to the plot. In the Power and the Glory, these warring elements are beautifully, seamlessly fused in the person of the priest and the battered Mexican state through which he wanders. Which is, perhaps, the major reason this book is considered his masterpiece.
Although Greene needed faith, he needed even more to reveal the truth of the world as he saw it, which is why he didn't use his gifts to become a great Catholic apologist, becoming instead one of the greatest English-speaking novelists.
It is not an easy read nor, at first glance, an uplifting one, although one can seem moments of redemption and revelation laid out in the book. Everything is set in a Mexican state that I believe is meant to represent Tabasco during the 1920's, shortly after the Institutional Revolutionary Party's ascension to power. At that time, and in that state, it seems that the Mexican government was carrying out a pitiless purge of Roman Catholic priests, and although there were a number of believers, they observed the Catholic rites underground. It appears that the government effected the purge using philosophical observations akin to Lenin's observation that religion is the opiate of the masses.
Greene had spent time in Mexico prior to writing the novel, and wrote a memoir that expressed his loathing for the country and all that he saw. And certainly, both the foreigners and the natives living in the novel's setting are deeply unhappy. The former suffer from a profound sense of dislocation, and often dream of going home. The latter are oppressed by unbelievably cruel hardships, including political repression and hunger.
Vargas Llosa explained that the novel presented a conflict between the upright Lieutenant, who is totally committed to his secular beliefs and hopes to extirpate the church in order to do away with obscurantism in the hopes of bringing paradise to this world. His bite noire is a priest, who is sinful, guilty of fornicating and drinking and yet, much more human than the rigid Lieutenant.
However, I did not see it that way. The Lieutenant is admirable in his own way, particularly when compared to his corrupt and complacent superiors. However, Greene paints the Lieutenant in broad brush strokes and spends relatively little time with him. Greene spends far more time with the corrupted "whiskey-priest," and the real conflict is between the whisky-priest's attempts to discern the nature of his own calling, which he pursues with increasing diligence, which is remarkable considering horrific suffering that he passes through, including near starvation. Still, the whiskey priest cannot decide if he was closer to God when he was a younger priest, relatively well to do and with a parish, or if he is closer now, even if he spends the night in jail and even if he robs rotten meat from a dog because he is hungry.
For me, Greene uses the whiskey-priest to explore various theological conundrums. As the novel progresses, we see that the whiskey-priest is becoming weary of life, which is understandable because he has been on the run for eight years. And yet, when he returns to the very state where the police are chasing him, ostensibly to hear the last confession of a murderer, Greene makes clear that in part, the whiskey priest has begun to despair of this life. Thus, Greene asks us to ask if the priest's decision to return is a Christ-like gesture, in which he willingly sacrifices his own life for the betterment of another? Or it is a selfish gesture - in which his desire to die is in a way reflective of a selfish desire to cease living and thus cease suffering?
On that note, a remarkable aspect of the novel is the tremendous hatred that nearly every character feels towards this world. And yet, that contributes to the novel's power, because Christianity indeed deals and indeed to a degree condones a contempt for this life.
Regardless of the feelings that he may have harbored about Mexico, Greene sets out the priest's struggles with great subtlety and precision, showing him advancing towards a nearly beatific state at times while alternatively feeling repulsed and disgusted by the people around him. At each point, we are encouraged to ask if the priest is moving closer to God, or indeed farther away.
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