In this world, it's always blazingly hot…until the rains come. The priest knows that once the rains begin, he has no chance of escape. The mountains on the border are passable, at least when it's not raining, but come rain season you'd have better luck scaling the Wall in Westeros with a couple of toothpicks than getting over that terrain. Geographyįorests, rivers, and mountains dominate the terrain and make both travel and escape difficult.

We're treated to the sights, sounds, and smells of a river port, a city square, a tiny dental office, police barracks, jail cells, city residences, impoverished huts, plantation barns, and a seedy hotel where you can buy illegal booze. While Greene keeps the exact locations somewhat vague (he doesn't actually name the state), he brings them to life with vivid description. The narration follows the priest around, but also adopts the point of view of people near and far away from him. The action takes place mostly in small villages and plantations the priest visits or in the unnamed Capital. The protagonist of the novel is apparently the only living priest in the area-no pressure or anything.

The events in the novel transpire years into the suppression of the Catholic Church: houses of worship have long been destroyed or converted into government buildings, children have no memories of going to Mass, and most of the priests in the state have been hunted down and executed. Greene had visited Mexico during this time of religious persecution and had seen its effects up close and personal. The Power and the Glory is loosely set in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco during an anti-Catholic purge. Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is 'a violent, raw' work on 'suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption' ( The Atlantic ).Tabasco, a Southern Mexican State, during the 1930s But it's also his duty-and possibly his salvation. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows it's a trap. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too craven to take a bullet, he now travels as one of the hunted-attending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. He's known only as the 'whisky priest.' Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he's torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. This prize-winning novel of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply 'Graham Greene's masterpiece' (John Updike, The New York Review of Books ).

The power and the glory book