Description:

This prize-winning novel of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply “Graham Greene’s masterpiece” (John Updike, The New York Review of Books).   In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. He’s known only as the “whisky priest.” Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he’s torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too craven to take a bullet, he now travels as one of the hunted—attending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows it’s a trap. But it’s also his duty—and possibly his salvation.   Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is “a violent, raw” work on “suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption” (The Atlantic).

Review

Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory is a novel that refuses to let its protagonist be a hero. It pursues a whisky-sodden, cowardly priest through the swamps and police nets of a persecution-era Mexican state, strips him of every dignity and self-deception, and then, at the moment of his execution, insists that he has accomplished nothing at all. That the reader nonetheless closes the book with the uneasy sense of having witnessed something holy is the novel’s central argument made incarnate: grace does not require a worthy vessel, and sanctity has almost nothing to do with virtue. Greene builds this paradox not through theological statement but through the relentless physical squalor of the priest’s flight, through a cast of compromised minor figures, and through the most dangerous narrative move a religious novelist can make—a genuine, intelligent antagonist whose secular faith in the abolition of suffering matches the priest’s own convictions in intensity and, for long stretches, in moral seriousness.

What the novel most distinctively does, and what this review will defend, is collapse the apparent opposition between hunter and hunted by revealing them as rival mystics of the same temperament. The lieutenant is not a villain; he is described as a man who “had experienced 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.” The priest, for his part, has experienced God not in the sanctuary but through sin, failure, and the stubborn persistence of his office. Greene binds them together on the same police-station wall of wanted faces, mirrors their interior monologues, and stages their final confrontation as a long night-ride debate that is less about capture than about whether love, justice, and meaning can survive in the world each man believes he inhabits. The result is a theological novel in the Dostoevskian moral tradition that earns its existential weight by granting both positions their full sincerity—and their full emptiness.

The book opens not with the priest but with Mr. Tench, an English dentist stranded in a decaying port, picking at an ether cylinder and a wasted life. Into this stifling ordinariness steps a shabby stranger with a bottle of brandy in his hip, and the first chapter ends with the stranger summoned away to attend a dying child, missing the very steamer that might have carried him to safety. This pattern—the call of duty interrupting escape, the intrusion of spiritual obligation into the instinct for self-preservation—will structure the entire novel. The priest never chooses heroism; he is constantly caught, rerouted, pulled back into the dangerous interior by the demands of dying parishioners, sick children, and finally a wounded American bank-robber whom he knows is bait in a trap. Greene’s narrative method is to follow the priest’s consciousness so closely that we inhabit his fear and his physical wretchedness—the mule that sits down and refuses to go on, the feverish half-caste informer shaking on the mule behind him, the bone he takes from a starving mongrel in the abandoned banana station—while never letting us forget that this degraded figure is also the sole vehicle of the sacraments left in the state.

The lieutenant’s hostage system introduces the novel’s moral economy with brutal clarity. For every village that shelters the priest, a villager will be shot. The priest’s old parish of Concepción has already lost Pedro Montez, whose name the priest later borrows as an alias, and the village of his former mistress Maria watches its own hostage taken away after the lieutenant’s dawn raid. The system works by turning the priest into a walking death sentence for anyone who helps him, and the novel does not flinch from the consequence: the villages empty of welcome. Yet the priest continues to celebrate clandestine Masses with a chipped cup and stolen bread, continues to hear confessions, and Greene’s prose renders these moments with a strange, stripped-down beauty. “Heaven is here,” the priest preaches in a packed hut before the police arrive, “this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure.” The assertion is never allowed to remain merely homiletic; it is tested against the actual pain of hostages, the actual stench of the prison cell, the actual dying Indian child the priest carries through the rain toward a church over the border.

The novel’s central stretch—the priest’s imprisonment, release, and recovery at the Lutheran ranch of Mr. Lehr—is where its theology becomes most audacious. In the overcrowded, stinking police cell, the priest finally announces his identity, insisting on his own unworthiness: “I am a whisky priest. I am in here now because they found a bottle of brandy in my pocket.” He expects betrayal, but the criminals around him refuse to collect the reward. The solidarity Greene discovers in this squalid holding tank is one of the book’s quiet marvels, and it prepares the ground for the priest’s most startling reflection: “Hate was just a failure of imagination.” This is not cheap sentiment; it is earned against the pious woman in the same cell who has been jailed for possessing “good books” and who attacks the priest for sympathizing with the lovers nearby. The habit of piety, Greene suggests, can exclude everything—including grace. The priest’s release, when the lieutenant mistakes him for a smuggler and gives him alms, reads as a kind of miracle, yet the novel immediately complicates it by sending the priest into the abandoned banana station, where he reads from Coral Fellows’s poetry anthology, drags a bone from a starving dog, and recognizes that his reprieve has no meaning unless he uses it to go on being a priest.

It is at the Lehrs’ ranch, where the German-American Lutheran household nurses him back to health, that the priest’s double nature becomes most visible. He bathes in the stream, bargains over baptism fees in the village, hears confessions in the barn while smelling of brandy, and seems to have arrived at a provisional peace. Then the half-caste reappears with the message that a dying American bank-robber needs absolution across the border, and the priest’s inner argument begins. He knows it is almost certainly a trap; the mestizo has betrayed him before and will betray him again. But he turns his mule back, dismisses his escort, and rides into the trap because—“even a coward has a sense of duty.” The confession he receives from the dying gringo is barely a confession. The man warns him to leave, manages only obscenity, and receives what the priest can only call a conditional absolution, whispered in the storm. The scene is the novel’s starkest statement of its own logic: the sacrament is valid not because the penitent is repentant nor because the priest is worthy, but because the office operates through the act. The lieutenant, arriving at the hut door as the storm breaks, understandably finds this obscene.

The long night ride back to the capital, during which the two men play cards and argue theology, is the book’s intellectual climax. The lieutenant presents a coherent materialist utopianism: bread, schooling, the abolition of suffering, a world in which children do not die for lack of medicine and peasants are not taxed by a Church that promises them pie in the sky. The priest concedes much of the factual case—the Church has been rich, complicit, on the wrong side of class—but refuses the lieutenant’s conclusion because he cannot accept a world in which suffering has no meaning and love is a biological accident. “If there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too,” he asserts from the dark of his cell, and the line is both a statement of solidarity and a refusal of the justice the lieutenant wants. Greene does not adjudicate this debate. He lets each man’s position carry its own internal coherence, and he lets each man’s subsequent emptiness speak to the limits of his faith. The lieutenant, having executed the priest, finds the “spring of action” broken; the priest, facing the wall, feels only “an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all.” Both men are left hollow, but only one death proves generative.

That generativity is the novel’s final, cunning move. Greene executes the priest offstage, seen obliquely through the windows of bystanders: Mrs. Fellows in her hotel room, Mr. Tench drilling the Chief of Police’s tooth while the squad forms in the yard below, a mother racing through the final chapter of the pious martyrology of “young Juan” for her sleepy daughters. This embedded hagiography, running as a counter-text throughout the novel, is the official version of sanctity—a bloodless, heroic boy-martyr whose last words are “Hail Christ the King!”—and its juxtaposition with the brandy-soaked, frightened actuality of the priest’s death is Greene’s sharpest interrogation of the gap between the Church’s tidy iconography and the disordered reality of holiness. And yet, in the closing pages, the mother’s son Luis, who had been enthralled by the stories of martyrs, watches the new priest arrive at the Fellows’ door that very night, a thin pale stranger who has just come up the river, and kisses his hand before he can give his name. The hunted Church regenerates faster than the state can extinguish it, and the abstract office outlives every individual failure. The boy’s gesture draws the real martyr into the same frame as the legendary one, and the question the novel leaves open is whether the gap has been closed or merely papered over.

The novel’s architecture relies heavily on doublings and parallels, and these are not merely decorative. The priest’s namelessness—he travels under the alias “Montez,” the name of a hostage shot in Concepción—makes him representative, a vessel rather than an individual, and reinforces Greene’s argument that sanctity is impersonal. The sacramental symbolism of brandy and wine fuses the matter of the Eucharist with the emblem of the priest’s vice, so that grace and damnation pour from the same bottle. The half-caste informer is an explicit Judas, and the priest’s tenderness toward him—“It must sometimes be a comfort to a soldier that the atrocities on either side were equal: nobody was ever alone”—enacts the book’s hardest claim, that the betrayer too bears the divine likeness. Even the minor figures are drawn into the pattern: Padre José, the conformist married priest who survives by abdication, is the road the whisky priest did not take, and his despair is identified as “the unforgivable sin,” the spiritual death against which the protagonist’s drunken, cowardly persistence registers as a kind of fidelity.

The novel’s weaknesses are real, and they emerge precisely from its strengths. Greene’s relentless focus on the priest’s consciousness, while masterfully executed, leaves the lieutenant’s inner life comparatively schematic; we are told of his mystical vacancy and his love for the plaza children, but we are not made to feel them with the same visceral immediacy as the priest’s hunger, thirst, and fear. The female characters—Maria, Brigida, Mrs. Fellows, the pious woman in the cell—are almost entirely defined by their relation to the priest’s vocation or flight, and the novel’s treatment of Brigida, while emotionally devastating, is essentially static: she is the wound he cannot heal, the love he cannot purify, and she remains a symbol rather than a developing presence. The embedded martyrology of “young Juan” is an elegant structural device, but its repeated interruptions can feel programmatic, a too-neat counterpoint that occasionally tips the novel toward allegory at the expense of the gritty realism that is its greatest asset. And the novel’s theological resolution—that the priest goes to God empty-handed and that this emptiness is precisely the condition of grace—while powerful, depends on a specifically Catholic understanding of the sacraments that some readers will find an article of faith rather than a dramatic conclusion.

Yet to criticize The Power and the Glory for being a Catholic novel is to mistake its genre. It belongs to the tradition of religious-existential fiction that understands doubt not as the enemy of faith but as its necessary condition, and its closest kin are the novels that stage spiritual contest between believer and atheist-idealist while refusing to stack the deck. The lieutenant’s anticlerical socialism is given genuine intellectual weight; the novel’s engagement with the Cristero-era persecution embeds real historical detail—the Calles laws, the government pensioner-priests, the geography of the Grijalva basin—into its fictional world without claiming documentary authority. The cross-references scattered through the text—the poetry anthology with its Tennyson and Scott excerpts, the Gideon Bible with its listed texts for various states, the correspondence-school materials that educated Coral Fellows—ground the novel in a recognizably modern, literate landscape, even as its central drama unfolds in jungle huts and stinking cells. Greene’s use of free indirect style grants both the priest and the lieutenant equal interior access, making the theological argument dramatic rather than didactic and holding the moral contest genuinely open until the final pages.

The canonical traditions the novel inhabits—literary fiction, religious-mystical writing, existentialism, and the communist-socialist critique it both absorbs and resists—are held in suspension rather than resolved, and that suspension is the novel’s most enduring achievement. Greene does not demonstrate that the priest’s faith is true or that the lieutenant’s vacancy is false; he demonstrates that each man’s faith, followed to its end, produces a specific kind of emptiness, and that one of these emptinesses turns out to be capable of renewal while the other does not. The new priest knocking at the door is not Greene’s reassurance that everything will be all right; he is the assertion that the office continues, that the hunted thing outlasts the hunter, that even the worst priest—and the whisky priest is very bad indeed—can be the channel through which something arrives that the state cannot track or extinguish.

Who should read this novel? Anyone who suspects that heroism and holiness are not the same thing, and that the second may be more likely to appear in a man who can’t stop drinking, can’t stop sinning, and can’t stop going back. Anyone interested in the fictional possibilities of serious theological argument, staged not in seminaries but in swamps, prison cells, and the saddle of a dying mule. Anyone who wants to see what a novel of ideas looks like when it has dirt under its fingernails. The Power and the Glory is not a comfortable book; it refuses to let its readers feel righteous about the priest’s death or satisfied by his sanctity. What it offers instead is a portrait of unworthiness pressed into service, and the unnerving suggestion that the gap between the whisky priest and the saint may be smaller than the one between the saint and the man who has never known how badly he needs to be forgiven.

Notable Quotes

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Mr. Tench reflects on how a discarded dental cast in his father's waste-paper basket determined his own career, and by extension his exile in Mexico. — fate, childhood, determinism

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.

The lieutenant lies in his monastic room reflecting on his atheism, which Greene presents with the same intensity and conviction as religious mysticism. — atheism, conviction, nihilism, faith

I am meant to miss it.

The priest realizes a child's summons will cause him to miss the boat to Vera Cruz, recognizing the inescapable pattern of duty pulling him back from escape. — duty, fate, escape, vocation

He had the dignity of an idea, standing in the little whitewashed room in his polished boots and his venom. There was something disinterested in his ambition: a kind of virtue in his desire to catch the sleek respected guest of the first communion party.

The lieutenant studies the priest's photograph on the wall, and Greene establishes that ideological hatred can possess its own austere nobility. — idealism, hatred, virtue, state-power

It's impossible. There's no way. I'm a priest. It's out of my power.

When the child Coral suggests the priest could renounce his faith, he explains that priesthood is indelible—like a birthmark, Coral observes. — vocation, identity, sacrament, permanence

O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.

The priest, meeting his illegitimate daughter Brigida and seeing corruption already forming in her, offers a prayer of total self-sacrifice. — parental love, sacrifice, damnation, grace

When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist.

The priest debates whether to flee or stay, recognizing that he is the sole remaining channel through which the sacraments can reach the people. — vocation, duty, sacrament, abandonment

It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

The priest listens to the mestizo's jumbled confession of sins and reflects on the nature of Christ's sacrifice. — atonement, corruption, grace, sacrifice

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.

The priest, having revealed his identity in the crowded prison cell, feels a strange calm as he contemplates his likely execution. — prison, peace, mortality, acceptance

We don't know. It may be. But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know—from experience—how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones.

In the prison cell, the pious woman demands the priest condemn the couple making love in the darkness, and he refuses. — beauty, sin, fallen angels, compassion

Hate was just a failure of imagination.

The priest reflects on the pious woman's anger, thinking that if one visualizes any person carefully enough—the lines at the corners of their eyes, the shape of their mouth—it becomes impossible to hate. — compassion, imagination, hatred, empathy

He held the coin in his fist—the price of a Mass. He said with astonishment: You're a good man.

The lieutenant, not recognizing the priest, gives him five pesos and tells him to leave. The priest is genuinely moved by the gesture. — goodness, irony, mercy, enemy

That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.

The priest stands near his own photograph on the police station wall, reflecting that in his former days of innocence he had felt less love than in his current corruption. — sin, grace, corruption, paradox

It wouldn't make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.

The priest argues to the lieutenant that the sacraments retain their efficacy regardless of the priest's personal worthiness. — sacrament, unworthiness, grace, theology

I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too. I just want justice, that's all.

In the hut with the lieutenant after his capture, the priest makes his most radical theological statement—his solidarity with the damned. — damnation, justice, solidarity, mercy

Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

The priest describes God's love to the lieutenant as something terrifying—fire in a bush, open graves, the dead walking—not the sentimental love of pious imagery. — divine love, terror, God, fear

He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.

The priest's final reflection on the morning of his execution, overwhelmed not by fear but by the immensity of his failure. — sainthood, failure, regret, death

Tears poured down his face: he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all.

The priest weeps on his last morning, and Greene reveals that his deepest suffering is not fear but the recognition of wasted potential. — regret, failure, death, grace

Loving God isn't any different from loving a man—or a child. It's wanting to be with Him, to be near Him. It's wanting to protect Him from yourself.

The priest counsels an old woman during confession at the Lehr ranch, defining love in terms that reflect his own tortured relationship with God. — love, God, protection, unworthiness

He was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.

Riding away from the port into the interior after missing his boat, the priest reflects on how his role binds him to these people more than any earthly authority could. — duty, slavery, priesthood, sacrifice

This child is worth more than the Pope in Rome.

The lieutenant, addressing the villagers during his search, points to the priest's own daughter Brigida and proclaims the materialist faith that animates his persecution. — children, materialism, state-power, value

He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago.

The lieutenant walks home through the town he has helped remake, viewing the erasure of the Church as a necessary cleansing of corrupted memory. — revolution, memory, destruction, ideology

He was like a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour.

The priest sends the mestizo toward his hometown Carmen on the mule and turns away, cut off from every place of safety or belonging. — exile, homelessness, alienation, pursuit

Once, he had asked himself that. The fact is, a man isn't presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and one bad. He gets caught up.

The priest explains to the lieutenant why he stayed when other priests fled, describing moral choice not as a clear fork in the road but as a gradual entrapment. — moral choice, inertia, fate, courage