Graham Greene
1940
Around 225 pages
I love me some Graham Greene, even though I do think he is overrepresented on this List. We still haven't hit peak Greene, and I wouldn't say this was a must read unless you are a fellow GG head. I still haven't landed on a fandom name by the way.
Authors sure enjoy having unnamed first characters. I guess it's a way of knocking down the walls between the reader and our protagonist. Or maybe these characters are all demons and saying their name out loud would cause their heads to explode. In any case, our unnamed main character is an alcoholic priest living in Mexico, during a time where Catholicism and alcohol were illegal.
Like Tomas Garrido Canabal, I believe that the Catholic Church is evil and that women should have the right to vote. Obviously, I don't sanction any violence. But as far as tyrannical regimes go, this one had its perks. Graham Greene wrote about his experiences of witnessing religious persecution in Mexico, writing "That, I think, was the day I began to hate the Mexicans" and at another point wrote about his "growing depression, almost pathological hatred...for Mexico." Strangely, these sentiments aren't really present in the novel, and I was surprised to read that he felt this way. Well, it's not the first time I've been gobsmacked by an author's real opinions (why Jo, why?).
As a writer he is still finding his way, but because it's Greene, we can expect better in the future.
RATING: ***--
Interesting Facts:
Interesting Facts:
In 2005, it was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923.
In 1983, Greene said that he first started to become a Christian in Tabasco, where the fidelity of the peasants "assumed such proportions that I couldn't help being profoundly moved."
The title is refers to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen."
UP NEXT: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
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