Review :: The Power and the Glory :: Graham Greene

In the last few weeks Cindy has read two novels about what happens when the world falls apart: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. She enjoyed both, I think. At the very least she's inspired me to give each book a read.

Her reading has also made me reappraise the book I've been reading, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Like a good novel should, The Power and the Glory tells a good story--the story of the last priest in a province of revolutionary Mexico in where all the church have been forcibly shut down. The priest is all too human, crippled by alcohol and by fear, both yearning for and cowering from his inevitable capture by the red-shirt authorities. Greene writes beautifully. And, as one might expect of a Graham Greene novel, the hard question of faith--why believe?--emerges subtly in the texture of characters and events. The story is worth reading as a story.