Volume 37, Number 13 · August 16, 1990
The Passion of Graham Greene
By John Updike
The Power and the Glory, first published fifty years ago in a modest English edition of 3,500 copies, is generally agreed to be Graham Greene's masterpiece, the book of his held highest in popular as well as critical esteem. Based upon less than two months spent in Mexico in March and April of 1938, including five weeks of grueling, solitary travel in the southern provinces of Tabasco and Chiapas, the novel is Greene's least English, containing only a few minor English characters. Perhaps it succeeds so resoundingly because there is something un-English about the Roman Catholicism which infuses, with its Manichaean darkness and tortured literalism, his most ambitious fiction.
Feature, 2568 words
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