General Knowledge - Books and Authors - Discussion

A Masterpiece.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Green presents a fascinating and unique interpretation of religion and how it affects human nature. The most striking image presented by this interpretation is the lead character, a whisky priest with a bastard child. He stands as a paradoxical figure within himself, a highly respected official distributing confessions and baptisms to the locals, yet he is flawed inside and out grappling with his faith and to what purpose he serves. However, Green did not write this novel purely to state that priests are humans too, flawed just as they rest of us.

Instead, the novel reaches deeper as if religion in its traditional, most rigid form pulls down a veil over our eyes. These poverty-stricken desperate individuals living under an oppressive Mexican government look to an equally desperate man whose only concern is his own fruitless survival. They are blind, still governed by the ways of a meaningless, irrelevant church.

In the end, as the whiskey priest is finally hunted down by the authorities, he dies suddenly and without purpose or meaning. Green brilliantly contrasts his death with a mother reading to her children of the mightiest and most noble of God's followers dying triumphantly in a blaze of glory. There is no heroic battle, no glory and ultimately no power. He is simply a man and nothing more.

Of Human Bondage (1915) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.
Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins O Jerusalem.