Reading Order
The Power and the Glory Reading Order
Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. A whisky priest — alcoholic, the father of an illegitimate child, the last Catholic priest left in revolutionary Mexico — is hunted by a lieutenant of police who has made the eradication of religion his personal mission. One of the great Catholic novels in English and Greene's own favorite among his works.
Where to start
The Power and the Glory
Complete The Power and the Glory Book List
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The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene·1940·Standalone novel — the unnamed whisky priest and the lieutenant in 1930s Mexico; approximately 220 pages; Greene visited Mexico in 1938 and witnessed the Cristero War's aftermath firsthand, recording his experience in 'The Lawless Roads' (1939), which served as direct research for this novel; the novel won the Hawthornden Prize but was condemned by the Vatican for 'paradoxical elements' - Buy
The Quiet American
OptionalGraham Greene·1955·Greene's other masterwork — Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong in 1950s Saigon; less explicitly Catholic than The Power and the Glory but sharing its portrait of a morally compromised man navigating an impossible political situation; many readers consider it Greene's finest novel - Buy
The Heart of the Matter
OptionalGraham Greene·1948·Scobie, a police officer in British West Africa during World War Two, whose Catholicism and sense of pity destroy him — the most directly Catholic of Greene's West African novels; where The Power and the Glory is about the question of whether grace can work through a sinful priest, The Heart of the Matter is about whether a man can be damned by his own compassion
The Power and the Glory — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'The Power and the Glory' mean?
The title comes from the doxology appended to the Lord's Prayer in Protestant tradition: 'For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.' The irony is that the 'power and the glory' of the title refers to a whisky priest who is, by any external measure, a failure — he is an alcoholic, has fathered a child, is hunted as a criminal, and cannot even perform the sacraments properly. The novel's argument is that divine grace works through this failure: that the 'power and the glory' are present in the most degraded and compromised human instrument. Greene is inverting the conventional idea of spiritual authority.
Is the whisky priest a good person?
The whisky priest is one of the most complex moral figures in twentieth-century English fiction. He is, by conventional Catholic standards, a failed priest: he drinks, he has fathered a daughter with a woman in his parish, he is afraid of martyrdom, and he cannot perform the sacraments correctly while drunk. But the novel argues that he is, despite all this, a vessel of divine grace — that his sacraments are valid regardless of his personal unworthiness, and that his very awareness of his own sinfulness keeps him humble in a way that his persecutor the lieutenant, who is morally upright and sincere in his idealism, cannot be. Greene's Catholicism involves the paradox that the sinner who knows he is a sinner may be closer to grace than the righteous man who does not need it.
Is this a good introduction to Graham Greene?
The Quiet American is arguably a better introduction to Greene because it is less explicitly Catholic — The Power and the Glory is deeply embedded in Catholic theology, and readers who are not familiar with Catholic ideas about the sacraments, mortal sin, and grace will miss some of what the novel is doing. That said, The Power and the Glory is universally considered one of Greene's two or three greatest works, and its narrative is compelling even without the theological background; the chase structure and the portrait of the Mexican setting are as vivid as anything Greene wrote.
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