Over the course of the weekend I read Graham Greene’s excellent novel The Power and the Glory (1940), often acclaimed as his highest work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_and_the_Glory). This marks my first excursion into what some readers have termed “Greeneland.” It was an exhilarating and moving experience, and I’m already looking forward to my next foray into his detailed, terse, religiously rich landscape. In this novel Greene expertly examines questions of death, guilt, sin (especially the sin of despair), death, redemption, duty, death, morals, martyrdom and hypocrisy. Did I mention death? The narrative is a deceptively straightforward account of the persecution of a drunkard priest, the unnamed protagonist, by an equally unnamed lieutenant working for the "red shirts".
Some quotes from my reading notes follow. Greene has an uncanny talent for psychological revelation, fully able to reach even the most religion-less among us (religion here is the magnifying glass, not the mass of human soul revealed by it) and always used as a scalpel-sharp instrument of character development. He is in possession of other enormous gifts as a writer, which it will be hopefully be your pleasure to experience first hand.
"There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy -- a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew." (p. 24-25).
"You cannot control what you love -- you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He closed his eyes -- he was a happy man -- and hummed a tune." (p. 36)
"They had been used to losing children, but they hadn't been used to what the rest of the world knows best of all -- the hope which peters out." (p. 49)
"It is one of the strangest discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times; even in danger and misery the pendulum swings." (p. 59)
"Death was not the end of pain -- to believe in peace was a kind of heresy." (p. 76)
"This place was very like the world; overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short." (p. 125)
"..., just as one forgets that one will ever die. It comes suddenly on one in a screeching brake or a whistle in the air, the knowledge that time moves and comes to an end." (p. 133)
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