Chateau Lloyd

Posting has been light because I was busy finishing off Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.  It is an absorbing story set during the period of Catholic persecution in Mexico, which led to the Cristero War.

Greene is vague on the details, giving only the most cursory references to time, geography and even characters.  Indeed, the primary character is a troubled Catholic priest with no name - he refers to himself as 'a whiskey priest,' a reference to his alcoholism.  He has also fathered a daughter, and in ordinary times, he would be a figure of ridicule and scorn, but against his will, he is seen as a heroic figure by the faithful who gratefully accept the sacraments from him.

I have to admit that I would have gotten more out of it if I simply read it as any other book, but instead, I found myself analyzing Greene's writing style, dialog, description, plot points and such.  I was therefore unsurprised by some of the plot twists, but Greene's ending was both surprising and satisfying.

Modern writing seems sterile, most juvenile genres, perhaps because people didn't have the wide experiences of travel, war, revolution and of course faith, as Greene did.  The West has been aggressively secularized, and a classic example is how The Force, which was mysterious and spiritual was redefined as a function of biology in the Star Wars prequels (another reason why I hate them).

Greene, like Evelyn Waugh, puts religion squarely in his stories, yet at the same time is not afraid to mock the hypocrisies  of its practitioners.  I picked up a handful of cheap paperbacks by Greene, and will continue to read through them.  They are only a couple of hundred pages, which is refreshing given all the door stoppers I've been reading over the past couple of years.