My love of speculative fiction, a genre that tends to emphasize interesting ideas over deep ones, nearly made me abandon The Power and the Glory after the first hour I spent reading it. The book seemed too slow, too confusing, too boring to be worthwhile. But I'm glad I stuck to it, because in the end the book became a deep and surprisingly moving account of one man's struggle to maintain his faith.

The man in question is the "whisky priest," a once well-to-do Catholic priest now running from the authorities in an area of Mexico that has repudiated Catholicism and condemned its priests to death. But the preist is plagued by more than the authorities--he also has to deal with his growing despair, his religious doubts, and his never-ending struggle against the joint temptations of alcohol and pride.

Despite the fact that the priest is being chased, the action in the book is pretty dull. What makes The Power and the Glory so remarkable is Greene's complex and compelling treatment of the priest's faith. The priest wants to believe despite the religious aridity of the world around him, but he doubts his own authority, his own ability to honestly represent the beauty of Catholicism. His chase and his inevitable capture should be the stuff from which martyrs are made, but the priest knows that he doesn't measure up to the martyrs of the past--his soul is sullied by his own repeated sins, and he is afraid that in his final moments he will think not of God but of fear, and death. And in the priest's repeated avocations against becoming too proud, Greene powerfully showcases the conflicting pulls of a good religion on a bad man.

It's hard to see, and even harder to describe, but there is a definite shape and flow to Greene's exploration of the priest's faith, one that is perfectly attuned both to the physical events of the story and to the development of Greene's ideas about religious faith and doubt. And Greene writes about these ideas with a practiced hand, never descending into cliches or mere exposition, maintaining a fresh and interesting dialogue with the reader despite dozens of pages with nothing more than the priest's own internal ramblings.

But the book has more virtues than just its abstract ideas: Greene also fills the book with plenty of remarkable scenes, such as the sick comedy that takes place when the priest attempts to illegally purchase a bottle of wine, only to see it casually drained away by the men who are trying to capture him. The characters besides the priest are also wonderful: the faithless young lieutenant who pursues the priest, the near toothless mestizo who accompanies him, even the exiled foreign dentist who waits desperately for a chance to go home.

The Power and the Glory is not an exciting novel, and its slowness may still turn off readers who may not care too much about Greene's ideas. But the book is more than worth the effort it takes to read through it, from its dusty and bug-ridden introduction to its ultimately moving conclusion.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu