One of the interesting features of The Power and the Glory is that the narrative of the whisky priest is interspersed with the telling of the story of Juan, told by another character in hagiographic style. But I would suggest that a greater and more subtle temptation lies in the other direction. But this is a matter of knowing our own limitations and proclivities, not a valid general judgement on the book. Why, then, read such books at all? Are they not all simply an occasion of sin? Should we not say, “lead us not into temptation” and lay them aside? In some cases, maybe we should. In Brighton Rock, Green presents us with yet another Catholic sinner, Pinky, the petty gangster whose gang likes to cut up people with straight razors.Īll novels are about sin. In both cases, it is serious sexual sins that are the subject of the novel and that are present or alleged in the lives of its authors. Art imitates life in a novel just as Diller argues that it does in the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley. We are asked to deny Christ many times, and many times we do.Īnother of Green’s Catholic novels is The End of the Affair, supposedly modeled on his own affair with another man’s wife. Both choices, certainly, would be true to how Catholics experience life, how they face the world’s demands that they apostatize. It would still be a great Catholic novel even if he had made the opposite choice. We can’t, therefore, anoint The Power and the Glory a great Catholic novel merely because the whisky priest chooses to attend the dying man rather than escape. This is why even the simplest, cheesiest romance novel requires two suitors, not just one. Even if one choice is, in the literary sense, more satisfying than the other, it is only because the other choice is so real, so plausible, that the choice the character does make is satisfying at all, rather than merely predictable. A story in which only one choice is possible is a story without tension. In any novel there is a moment of choice, and in great novels the choice is poignant specifically because both choices are plausible, both choices are, in some sense, satisfying, if only because we recognize the humanity in both of them. It is what most editors would have urged as well.
It is the ending that most ordinary novelists would probably have given, celebrating the ingenuity of their hero and his seeing through the trap intended to doom him. I’m not arguing it would be a better ending. It would complete the pathos of this sinner’s agonizing journey. In many ways, it would be more true to life, more probable. But would that invalidate the beauty and pathos of the rest of the novel? Would it be a false ending? I think not. What if he had not gone? What if, instead, he had sent the messenger away, and escaped? We would be deprived of that moment of spiritual uplift that the real ending gives us. He knows it is a trap, but he goes anyway, and is captured and executed. The whisky priest finds his moment of grace at the end of the novel when, having escaped across the border, he is summoned back into Tobasco to the bedside of a dying man. The pathos of his attempts to procure enough wine to say Mass, only to have it stolen and drunk before his eyes by a corrupt official, is extraordinarily moving.
Elven legacy collection review skin#
He is, like Greene himself perhaps, hanging on to his faith by the skin of his teeth. He is also the last priest in the Mexican province of Tabasco, fleeing from an anticlerical government. The whisky priest in Greene’s The Power and the Glory has lived a similarly debauched life. Greene lived his life to extremes: he had serious affairs, sometimes simultaneously, with at least three women, amid a host of more casual liaisons he spied for MI6, smoked opium, visited prostitutes. As Ruth Franklin wrote in a 2004 New Yorker article: Yet this would present us with a problem, for every author is a sinner, and if we don’t give authors a pass on their sinfulness when evaluating their work, we stand in danger of rejecting every author and every novel. Miriam Diller, in her essay “The Dark Side of Fantasy and Science Fiction”, writes:įamous artists and writers often get a “pass” on unsavory aspects of their lives, for (some say) such details are not relevant to their “genius.” Their personal behavior and beliefs, like any celebrity’s, are often buried by their accomplishments.ĭiller argues that, in the case of specific authors that she discusses, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, such authors should not get a pass on their unsavory personal lives.
0 kommentar(er)
