Halfway There: "The Power and The Glory"

This is the second installment in what will be a monthly tackling of each of our book club selections from the perspective of being half finished with the book.

Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory"

TALKING POINTS MEMO: I think this book is just fantastic. The flight of The Whiskey Priest draws you in, and the writing is brilliant. I really like a book that doesn’t hand you everything out front, but gives it to you in pieces, and lets you fill in the gaps. This book has been called Greene’s masterpiece and it is only just over 200 pages. I feel like there are underline-able passages on each page turn. It is that good.

“One mustn’t have human affections – or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child.”

“I’M JUST ASKING QUESTIONS.” Like McCarthy’s characters in “The Road” the two main characters remain nameless. The Lieutenant and The Priest are also a study in contrasts: the flawed but compassionate whiskey priest, and the calculating, brutal lieutenant. The story, of course lends itself to allegory – the journey, spiritual and otherwise. But instead of a journey from A to B, the priest only seems to circle over the same landscape, unable (and/or unwilling) to escape from his duty and destiny. It is easy to see that this book isn’t going to end good for the priest. The question for him, I think, is whether he will maintain what little faith and dignity he has left to him.

“He felt an unwilling hatred of the child ahead of him and the sick woman – he was unworthy of what he carried... ‘Let me be caught soon…Let me be caught.’”

THE SPIN ZONE: One big fat question I have is whether Greene’s ideals as expressed in “Power and Glory” are more Christian, or simply humanitarian. Though The Priest reveals that his aspirations are for personal glory and a posh appointment, at his best, he has a strong desire to administer sacraments to the neediest and most poor people of the areas in which he travels – at his own peril.

“Suddenly and unexpectedly there was agony in the cemetery. 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. He knew he was in the grip of the unforgivable sin, despair.”

YOUR MOMENT OF ZEN: On the short list of “books I need to read” (yes there is a long list) in no particular order: Let us Now Praise Famous Men, Lonesome Dove, Spook, All Over But the Shoutin’, Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m also still working on my New Year’s resolution from last year, which is to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners. I think I’m over halfway there. Books I’m pondering for next book club: Clockwork Orange, Iron Lake, Earth Abides, Dead I Well May Be.