2005-07-19 - 12:50 p.m. - The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
I've got a backlog of a few books at this point, so these next few entries may be a bit spotty. Even moreso than usual. This was an interesting book for me to read, because Graham Greene was an ardent Catholic and moralist, and I am neither of those things, at least not the first one. More to the point, this book specifically revolves around the plight of a not-very-good priest on the run in some state in Mexico that's going through an anti-clerical purge during the Depression. So it's pretty clear that he's trying to say something about what it means to be a good person and a good Catholic, and there are a lot of interesting things going on here. I also gather that Greene had also actually visited such places and was sort of reporting on them, in addition to trying to write a novel. I dunno, this was weird. I liked it a lot, the pace is kept up, and the "hunted man" premise means there's never a shortage of suspense and drama. But, though I followed all of the priest's moral conflicts and contortions as they were going on, I never quite figured out what Greene was trying to say, and now a couple weeks after reading the book I can't really even remember what the priest said. It was good enough that I picked up another Greene book very shortly after (entry about that coming in a few minutes), which says something since I normally try to take breaks between authors. Somehow I just don't have much to say about this.