The Power and the Glory

The test is subtractive, and the spine resists it. A hunted priest, a lieutenant who hunts him, a betrayer, a border, a return, a death: none of this can go. The chapters of onlookers look removable and are not. Mr Tench the dentist, who opens the book and closes the execution, is the godless world in which the priest dies without witnesses who understand it. The Fellows on their banana station give Coral, the child who hides the priest and asks him the one practical question about faith he cannot answer. The pious mother reading the life of the boy martyr Juan supplies the false hagiography against which the true death is measured. What holds the axis below the top: the Fellows marriage is sketched more than it needs, Mrs Fellows a figure of comic dread repeated rather than deepened, and the stay with the Lehrs runs a little long for what it adds.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds. Holiness is not a condition of the vessel: a drunken, frightened priest who has fathered a child carries a sacrament and a love that the clean and the correct do not, and he cannot see it in himself. Beside it stands a political disclosure. The lieutenant’s idealism is real; he truly wants the children of the state to have a better life, and it is that love, abstracted, that shoots hostages from village after village. The book refuses both easy sides: the pious are complacent, the revolution is cruel, and the priest, despicable by his own account, is the only one who goes back. The prison night discloses something exact, that pity begins when one looks closely at another: “hate was just a failure of imagination”. What holds the axis there: the theology at moments arrives as the priest’s reflection rather than in the event, and the Indian world is seen only from outside.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The register is not the high one: heat, vultures, sweat, bad teeth, brandy. Elevation comes as pity and as dread, and it recurs. The night in the crowded cell, with a couple making love in the dark and a pious woman’s outrage, where the priest feels for these people the love he could not feel for the respectable, is the book’s summit and one of the great scenes of its decade. The Indian woman at the field of crosses, laying a lump of sugar by her dead child, carries a terrible grandeur in silence. The last night, the priest’s dream of a meal at the altar and his waking certainty that only one thing counted, “to be a saint”, and that he had missed it, rises very high. The execution seen from Tench’s window, between two pulls at a jefe’s tooth, is elevation by withholding. What holds the axis there: the flight across swamp and mountain is often flat by design, and the heights are spaced.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth built, and the plot bears it. The pattern is the Passion: a flight; a betrayal by a man the priest knows will betray him, the mestizo with his yellow fangs who follows him for the reward; a summons across the border to a dying man, which the priest knows to be a trap and answers anyway; an arrest; a night of interrogation by the ruler’s officer; a death; and at the end a stranger at the door who says he is a priest. The priest is unnamed, so that the particular carries the type, and he remains wholly particular: the brandy, the wine bought at ruinous cost and drunk by the governor’s cousin, the child Brigitta whom he loves and cannot save. The lieutenant is no cut-out Pilate but a celibate of the other faith, the priest’s double. The life of Juan read aloud inside the book is the myth told falsely, which the main story tells truly. The structure, not allusion, carries it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the Catholic novel of France, Bernanos above all, whose Journal d’un curé de campagne appeared in 1936, and Mauriac, and behind them Péguy’s sinner at the heart of Christianity; in English, Greene’s own thrillers and entertainments, with their chases and their seedy settings. The turn is the fusion: the manhunt of the thriller made the vehicle of a theology of grace, and a priest who is a drunkard and a father made the agent of sanctity, by an English convert, in English, where the Catholic novel had been a minor and apologetic mode. The stake was real: the Holy Office later sought changes, and Greene refused. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the sinful priest as a vessel of grace was already Bernanos’s ground, and the thriller form was Greene’s own proven path. The departure is in the joining and the place, not in a new kind of novel.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The priest is seen first from outside, in Tench’s eyes at the port, a shabby little man missing a boat, and only gradually from within; the reader meets the saint as the world met him, as nothing. The alternation of the priest’s chapters with the chapters of onlookers (Tench, the Fellows, the lieutenant, the mother reading Juan’s life) makes the form itself the claim that grace works unseen and is recorded wrongly. The fourth part keeps the death off the stage: the execution is a noise and a fall glimpsed from a dentist’s window, and a boy who had admired the lieutenant’s gun spits on it and opens the door to the new priest. Even the missing name is formal: there is no name for the hagiographers. What holds the axis there: the chase could carry other matter with less loss than the top requires, and the middle of the flight is episodic.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence first: eighty-six years of reading. The book has been read as a Catholic novel of grace and as a scandal to Catholics; as a political novel of revolution and persecution, and from the left as a reactionary one; as a dialogue of two faiths in the priest and the lieutenant, set beside Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor; as an Englishman’s Mexico, seen from outside; as the founding book of “Greeneland”. Its questions stay open. Is the priest a saint, or does he only believe at the end that he failed to be one? What becomes of Coral Fellows, whose fate the book leaves to inference? Is the lieutenant’s emptiness at the end a defeat, or the cost of his love? Is the new priest a succession or a consolation? What holds the axis there is the frame: the theology governs the readings more than in the deepest books, and they converge.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the English novel around 1940 and, within it, the novel of faith in any language. The intrinsic force: the book made the theological novel a major form in the English fiction of its century, gave it the pace and the world of the thriller, and set a man’s soul against a modern state’s ideology without allegory. The whisky priest entered the language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shusaku Endo’s Silence (1966), whose apostate priest under persecution answers Greene’s; Mauriac’s preface to the French translation, which carried the book into French Catholic letters; the later Catholic and political novels of Brian Moore and others; Greene’s own The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, which extend it; John Ford’s film The Fugitive (1947), much altered. What holds the axis there: the force renews and joins more than it reorganises, and in the wider field the century’s turns were made elsewhere.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Eighty-six years are weighed as eighty-six years, and the usual figure for that span is given, not more. The text survives whole, as published, in print throughout in Britain and America, translated widely, and taught in schools and universities as the central novel of Greene’s career and of the Catholic novel in English. Its surface is fixed to one persecution in one Mexican state in the 1930s, and to a Church before the Second Vatican Council: the confession, the Latin, the fear of dying in mortal sin. Both have passed, and the book is read now for what outlives them, which is the evidence the axis asks for. What holds it at the usual figure: its presence is wide but not the widest among the books of its decade, and part of it is concentrated in Catholic readers and the classroom.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Greene’s English. The command is of a prose exact, cool and dense with images, which sets its world from the opening, in “the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust”, and of a point of view that moves among Tench, the priest, the lieutenant, Coral and the mother without a seam. The dialogue between the priest and the lieutenant on the last night is a feat: an argument between two faiths made into talk between two tired men. The thriller’s craft bears weight: the mestizo’s shadowing, the pressure of the hostages, the trap across the border. Charged: the simile habit becomes mannered, “like” after “like” binding the physical to the abstract; the authorial voice at moments states a theology the scene had already carried; and the American gangster Calver, whose picture hangs beside the priest’s at the police station, is a device more than a man.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs the whole: the divine is present in what is squalid and absent from what is respectable, and everyone sees it wrongly. Take the two most distant elements: Tench’s dental chair at the port, with its ether cylinder and its talk of home, and the hagiography of the boy Juan, who dies a martyr before a firing squad. They obey the same law. Tench watches a true martyrdom and sees nothing; the pious book records a false one. The law covers the prison, the field of crosses, the Lehrs’ Lutheran propriety across the border, Padre José, the married priest mocked by children and too frightened to hear a confession, the lieutenant’s room, and the boy at the door. The range runs from comedy to agony and is held. What holds the axis there is a little convenience in the machinery of the trap.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Many orders, joined through one hunted man. Consciousness, in the priest’s self-contempt and his discovery of love. The family: Brigitta and her mother, the Fellows and their child, the household where Juan’s life is read. The state and the revolution, in the governor, the lieutenant and the hostages. The Church, in two kinds of priest and in the laity who wait for a sacrament. Class and race: the Indians of the villages, the mestizo, the English and German foreigners. Labour, in the banana station, the dentistry and the peasants. The natural order, in swamp, river, rain and mountain; death and the sacred over all. They are integrated, each a place the priest passes through or a witness to his passing. What holds the axis there: the book is short, its social world is drawn at speed, and the life of the Indian villages is largely a backdrop to the one soul.

Score: 8.2 / 10