The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

This novel is almost 80 is old, with the main theme being suppression of the Catholic church by the Mexican government in 1927-1929. Greene had spent some time in Mexico back in the 1930s. Having stood the test of time, this novel had been recognized as one the top 100 novels in the English language since 1930s, by the TIME magazine. This was published in 1940.

The main character is a wayward catholic priest, running from the law. He's fond of the bottle, and had fathered a daughter. Greene uses the term "whiskey priest", to identify the priest. Yet for all his ills, the priest is a keen observer of life, and a man with compassion. Albeit his fear of pain, the man cannot bring himself to run away to save his life, whenever his pastoral responsibilities come up. 

The characters present are interesting, as usual with Greene, and the reader may take up a private journey with few of the characters, and wonder how they fared. In this case, I was intrigued enough to think of the fate of Coral Fellows ( the girl who helped the father to hide, lying to her mother and challenging her father ), the ideology driven Lieutenant who hopes for a better future for his people in a secular state and the half-caste, the opportunist informant - easily the most deplored character in the book. The Book paints a vivid picture of  Mexico - its poverty stricken life, the helpless Indians and struggling expatriates. 

Just like The Heart of the Matter, The Human Factor, Our Man in Havana and a Burnt Out Case, this novel too is brimming with difficult questions that the main characters deal with over matters in life. The main character may lose, or may end up in no better position than they started at, but not before enabling the reader ponder over the human condition at length. I guess this is the main reason I keep returning to Graham Greene, for my relatively lighter reading, while not compromising on the dilemmas that the human condition is intricately bound with. ( For the record this is the 12th of Graham Greene's work that I've 'read' - read as in, listened via an audio book, plus a skim of the omnibus version of the book I have. The audiobook is a copy of an old recording which had come in a pack of seven cassettes, I learn. The narrator's notice that "this book continues at this point, on the other side of this cassette", had it charm for me, given that I loved my cassette tapes, before CDs took over ).