Literary work of the modern British writer Graham Green

Ярослав Колесов August 1, 2020

Introduction

The creative path of the eminent English writer Graham Green began back in the late 1920s, when he published his first novel, The Man Within (The Man Within, 1929). The formation of the novelist Green occurs in the 30s. The rapid pace of life, the sharp turns of human destinies have determined the dramatic severity of collisions in his works.

Graham Greene creates action-packed books, believing that the novel is inherently dramatic. The writer sees two genre varieties in his work: an "entertaining" novel and a "serious" novel. For the "entertaining" novel ("Gun for Sale" - A Gun for Sale, 1936, "The Trusted Person" - The Confidential Agent, 1939) is characterized by a detective plot, an adventure plot, murders "on stage" and more or less prosperous, although quite sad, the ending. For the "serious" novel ("This battlefield" - It's a Battlefield, 1934, "I created England" - England Made Me, 1935) are also typical elements of the detective, but to a lesser extent; here there is, rather, the theme of criminal action, which includes a social moment; murders occur "behind the scenes" and the denouement is catastrophic. Despite these differences, there is much in common between these genre varieties.

The fundamental difference between the novels of Green and ordinary detective literature is how the facts of crimes, murders, and cruelties are depicted. In a typical detective, these facts are only a chain of interesting, exciting events that can terrify, but which do not cause deep compassion and sympathy. In Green's novels, these facts are covered with psychological depth and in a tragic light; they are connected with the formulation of social and moral problems. In the criminal novel of Green, tragedy-style techniques are used, such as tragic irony, the motive for delusion, "recognition," the motive for the inevitability of the hero's death, etc. It is the tragic aspect that illuminates the nature of the terrible facts that have in the detective mainly the meaning of the necessary attributes genre and mandatory props, without which we can not do without.

In the early novels of Green, the tradition of Joseph Conrad, expressed in the interest of lonely outcast people, whose life is full of dangers and suffering, is palpable; in the tragic contradiction between a dream and reality; in the acute formulation of moral human problems in connection with topical political events; in a kind of combination of heroism and irony, tragedy and melodrama.

The dramatic characters and scenes in Green's novels often reach tragic power due to the severity of psychological conflicts and ethical pathos. Green is concerned with the problems of happiness, duty, conscience, trust, kindness, dignity and responsibility. And he raises them with tragic seriousness, seeking to find and confirm the moral foundations of a person living in a terrible world full of cruelty, betrayal, hatred. The Greek Catholic wants to rely on Christian morality, on the teaching of the church, but as a realist sees the dogmatism of Christianity, its contradiction with the best motivations of people. In those novels in which the main characters are Catholics, the author is interested not so much in religious ideas as in human conflicts, experiences, sufferings. The religious theme usually appears only in the most common, everyday terms - sin and virtue, curse and redemption. His Catholics are by no means holy, not martyr heroes, but ordinary people with all their real qualities ("Brighton Rock", Brighton Rock, 1938, "Power and Glory", 1940, "The essence of the matter "- The Heart of the Matter, 1948," End of a love affair "- The End of the Affair, 1951).

One of the characteristic features of the Green style is the paradox in the solution of the tragic theme ("Brighton Candy"). Greene said that ideas are often perceived through a paradoxical form and discarded as soon as they cease to amaze the imagination.

1. Short Biography of the Writer

Graham Greene (1904-1991) - English writer, essayist, novelist, novelist. In the 1940s - a British intelligence officer. Libra.

Realistic novels are marked by psychologism (The Essence of the Case, 1948), political relevance (The Quiet American, 1955, Our Man in Havana, 1958, The Comedians, 1966, Honorary Consul, 1973), a complex ethical problem "Power and Glory", 1940). Many works are close to the genre of a detective novel. Roman pamphlet "Doctor Fisher from Geneva, or Banquet with a bomb" (1980). Publicism (the book "My acquaintance with the general", 1984).

Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904 in Berkensted, Hertfordshire. He grew up in the family of a schoolteacher, graduated from Oxford University's Balliol College. Published since 1925, as a novelist made his debut in 1929 ("The man inside"). He was a full-time employee of the English newspaper "The Times", he led a literary column in the magazine "Spectator", where he was until 1940 and a permanent filmmaker.

During the years of study in Beylliol, Green published about 60 poems, short stories, articles, reviews (Oxford Outluk, Weekly Westminster Gazette, etc.). His poems were included three times in the annual anthology Oxford Poetry. True, the results were not impressive. The university was completed in June 1925 without special achievements. The book of the Greens poems, published in April 1925 in a small edition in the Oxford publishing house Basil Blackwell (it was born unexpectedly Victorian for the 20-ies the name of "Jumbling April", Babbling April), received negative reviews in the newspapers. And yet the Oxford years gave Green a lot. As editor of the Oxford Outluk magazine, he filled his hand, became almost a professional writer and read a lot (including the latest English, American literature, of Russian authors, Green especially appreciated E.Paund and TS Eliot, who thundered in 1922, the poem "The Bad Land", and then, after creating the poem "Hollow People" and "Ash Wednesday", made an Anglo-Catholic), succeeded in establishing literary contacts.

Many critics agree: Graham Green is the writer who "likes both ordinary readers and intellectuals alike." It is known that he himself divided his works into "serious" and "entertaining", but the differences between them are hardly significant. After all, most of Green's novels have a dynamic plot, intricate intrigue combined with political concepts that grow out of thinking about life.

He initially worked as a journalist at Nottingham Journal, then as a freelance correspondent for The Times. In 1926, he adopted Catholicism (as opposed to the Anglican Church that dominates the UK). After the release of his first novel "The Man Within" (The Man Within, 1929) left journalism. In 1932 he published an extremely topical political detective "Istanbul Express" (Stamboul Train). This and subsequent books with elements of the detective genre - A Gun for Sale (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Department of Fear (Ministry of Fear, 1943) - he called "entertaining ". More serious work was published in 1935, "I Made England" (England Made Me) - a book that reflected the process of changing society under the influence of progress.

Born in the family of the director of the privileged school of Charles Henry Green and Marion Green (née Raymond). In the family was the fourth of six children. In his childhood he liked to read the adventure literature of Haggard and Conrad (many years later Greene reckons that at the beginning of his writing career it was very difficult for him to get rid of the influence of these writers). In school years, the constant mockery of classmates led Green to several attempts at suicide and eventually forced to quit school. Further education he received at Balliol College, Oxford University.

Over his long life Green has repeatedly changed socio-political predilections, then speaking with sharp criticism of Western civilization, then pushing the idea of a "third world", which can only be strengthened by a certain synthesis of communism and Catholicism. But the artist's intransigence to all kinds of violence and arbitrariness - be it dictatorial, colonial regimes, manifestations of fascism, racism or religious intolerance - remained enduring. The writer was perceived as a kind of political seismograph, reacting to shocks and explosions of history, sensitively sensing the "painful places" of the planet.

In the 1930s, Green visited Liberia (1934-35) and Mexico (1938), resulting in two books of travel notes: "Travel without a map" (1936) and "Roads of lawlessness" (1939). Based on observations of the situation in Mexico in 1940, he created one of his best novels, "Power and Glory." The book at first aroused sharp criticism from the Catholic Church.

From 1941 to 1944, Green worked in British intelligence in Sierra Leone and in Portugal, where he was a representative of the British Foreign Office. One of his colleagues in those years was Kim Philby. After the Second World War, he was a correspondent for New Republic magazine in Indochina. Based on the events in South Vietnam in 1955-56 he created the novel "The Quiet American."

In the 1960-1970-ies as a reporter traveled a lot of countries, repeatedly visited the "hot spots". I was acquainted with many influential politicians, in particular, with the President of Panama, General Omar Torrijos. This acquaintance is partially reflected in John Perkins's book Confessions of an Economic Murderer.

After Greene defended the defendants in the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, he was temporarily stopped printing in the USSR (not a single publication between 1968 and 1980, since 1981 the publications have resumed).

He spent his last years in Switzerland. He died on April 3, 1991 in Vevey, Switzerland.

Many times nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but never received it because of the numerous claims of critics. The Swedish academician, poet and novelist Arthur Lundqvist stated that "this detective author will receive a prize only through my corpse."

2. The Title of the Work and the History of its Creation (if any). Description of the Main Characters and the Plot

"Power and Glory" (English The Power and the Glory) (1940) - Graham Greene's novel, recognized as a classic of world literature.

The book takes place during a period of severe persecution of the Catholic Church in post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s. The main hero of the novel is the "drinking padre" - a Catholic priest who, contrary to the order of the authorities, continues to walk through the deaf villages (in one of them his wife lives with his child), without trial and investigation, serve mass, baptize, confess and communicate his parishioners. At the same time, he, once a prosperous, ordinary, moderately virtuous priest, became a drinker from loneliness and despair and in general can give the impression of a pious man. Thus, the reader sees a paradoxical combination of personal spiritual weakness with a persistent aspiration for holiness, which manifests itself in service. Pursued by the military, the priest crosses the mountain range to the neighboring state, where for local masses the local laws provide for not firing squad, but only fine. He is settled by an influential and rich patron who offers the priest to stay and fearlessly serve in the local church, where there is no abbot. The priest refuses, gradually recovering from hunger and frostbite, and then, having received the news that the dying in the mountains wants to take communion, is sent to fulfill his duty, is ambushed and is under arrest. Subsequently, he is executed. In the final scene of the novel in a safe house, where the main character of the story used to be, a new priest appears in the middle of the night.

The conflict between earthly and heavenly values in "Power and Glory" unfolds not only in the soul of the priest, but also between two people, growing to the level of ideological, philosophical. On the one hand, we see the nameless "drinking padre," a pathetic and frail person in many respects, but he grows into a heroic figure, because he believes that he is "the hand of God." On the other - an unnamed police lieutenant, much more morally impeccable, representing the ideas of social justice and progress, which, incidentally, is faced with the task of "destroying the last priest in the state." And this image is also heroic in its own way. Dialogue, more precisely, the dispute between the police and the priest throughout the whole novel is conducted "in absentia", but in the end the author reduces the heroes, and in their last conversation there are no right and wrong.

In "Power and Glory" as a novel, a meeting occurs between the strength and powerlessness of the writer, the encounter of life and life, facts and allegories, and, if you like, the meeting of completely human narrative beliefs / disbelief in the being of the novel, the hero. Perhaps, the artistic text of Green is that rare situation when the movement to faith "from the opposite" can become productive - the good news of prose. But this, essentially, depends not only on the writer rationally processing his intuitive image, unfolding it into a multilateral composition, the contradictory combination of various scenes, details, characters, but also from the participant of this work no less important here, the reader, and a combination already in it of knowledge / ignorance, faith / disbelief.

The various lines of the novel of Green, woven together, diverge in different directions, exist separately, as if they say to the reader: do not sleep, read, believe! That is, the art of prose is capable of permeating time, extracting from it what is right and opposing "all the rest" (death) not oblivion, but silence, expectation of a miracle. Even the most ruthless, the most unfavorable time for faith - you can read if you wish Green - always sends us his Christian signs. Translating them from actuality into reality is associated with pain, love, sacrifice. Even the atheism of the lieutenant, the apostasy to Jose, the betrayal of the half-breed, turn out to be in the volume of the whole novel a reliable source of faith. Conversely, the faith of a woman in prison (condemning the Padre for his indulgence towards human weaknesses), Lutheranism of the correct Ler, flows into the absolute unhappiness of unbelief.

Some implicit readers, who are similar to Luis's mother, limit themselves to reading the lives - seeking holiness in the novel, perhaps, will leave them unsatisfied. Others, considering life to be beautiful, but perhaps somewhat far from life (in "Power and Glory" are associated high life, read aloud, having a predictable finale, and life seems to descend below a certain line that does not stand the test of life), will also seek confirmation their faith, but look in a special book of life - a narrative with an open ending, where it can only be guessed. It is possible that this search for the hero of the faith will have such readers - and on them the novel is calculated - as uneasy as the characters of Green, but still encouraging.

However, as already mentioned, in "Power and Glory" it is given to feel that in rare cases life and life under the sign of even unobvious holiness can change places. And yet, on the whole, the canonically life-giving, heroic Green began to minimize the creation of the image of the Padres. His weak saint is not a hero, not a medieval ascetic of piety. In the appendix to it, words remain words (high words: life is written), whereas saints need to become - to become in the world not miraculous, not medieval, unconsciously for themselves, in addition to their weaknesses, through deeds whose positive consequences are not of a direct nature. In the conscious lowering of the role of everything High, Heroic, Ideal, Miraculous in the novel - the position of Green, the creator of prose art, contemporary of the era of modernism, exacerbating all "pharisaism", on the one hand, and some jansenist on the other. His padre aspires to get out of the role of the padre, from the role of martyr and become himself, to find, like Hamlet, his true being. The highest reality of God in this being, according to the Green, is silence, death. Even the preceded words of the padre, which are guessed at a distance, do not sound churchly. Instead of the appropriate and suffering in the truthful transmission of the modern evangelical "forgive" (forgive, for example, in the prayer "Our Father": "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors", "... and forgive us our debts, like us forgive our debtors ... ") - by the way, Judas-mestiz, with the knowledge of the matter, pronounces the priest in the hands of his pursuers, - an awkward" Excuse "comes to Tench at the will of Green.

So, let's not hide this, "Power and Glory" touches on the sore point of 20th-century literature that puts the theme of faith. For the treatment of the topic is taken by the writer, who processes it literally, psychologically, by the measure of his subjectivity. As a result, the topic becomes not an obvious, but a symbol of a personal state. It can not be said that this is not fair. Subjectively, the writer seeks precisely maximum honesty, ruthlessness of analysis and introspection, but from this the topic not only does not clear up, but becomes a tangle of ambiguities.

And yet, despite the presence of certain difficulties confronting Greene, we first of all have a novel about the tragic persecution of the Church, a certain spiritual correspondence between the spirit of a particular historical epoch (era of mass falling away from the faith) and its clergymen (the image of a "drinking padre" ), about a special "weak hero" who, tormented by doubts, his own sins, perishes himself, but by the fact of his ministry and death saves others. In principle, this weakness does not contradict the Gospel knowledge of those who are the first to be able to become the first, and also about the power, according to the Providence of God, by the Grace of God in the weakness of the realized. The reference to the Gospel, to the mercy of God is emphasized by the title of the novel (The Power and the Glory).

This is a truncated quote from "Our Father" ("For Thine is the kingdom and power and glory forevermore." Amen. "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. It is obvious that in any treatment of the novel the "power" in it, with whatever paradoxes it binds, is associated through words of the main Christian prayer with spiritual power, with the Church (the Body of Christ), with the awareness of sin, with the rejection of a secular or neo-pagan totalitarian state and his evil, which is by seducing the duped masses, then by harshly pointing at the citizens of the point of bayonet or barrel of a revolver impersonates himself for good.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church introduced the novel into the "index", apparently considering that the image of persecution is one thing, and the mention of the unfair deeds of the clergyman (drunkenness and especially adultery, which puts the priest himself outside his dignity) is different.

Respecting Orthodoxy this decision of 1953, partly taken as a reaction to the appearance of the later works of the English writer, we will assume that the attitude to the character of Green as a living person is not always justified.

Hardly a novel (possibly reflecting something from the underground of the author's consciousness) was written with the aim of seducing someone by the personality of a fallen priest or by the paradoxes associated with him as a figure of a complex composition. Moreover, in popular perception, the novel "Power and Glory" was and remains a Catholic, Christian novel. We are aware of some vulnerability of such a statement, but still we risk to repeat it from ourselves in a slightly different form.

Modern society desperately needs religious art. In one way or another, responding to this need, its creators fell into the difficult situation during the XIX-XX centuries. They are called upon and not to limit their topic to a flat edification, and not to bring it through sophisticated intellectualism to its opposite (peculiar heresy or blasphemy). In the end, their addressee is still not a church man, and especially not monasticism, and the audience is predominantly secular. Not to take into account the peculiarities of modern perception, not to strive for a certain golden mean (a combination of seriousness and entertainment, fact and fiction, religiosity and moralism, pictures of the sublime and low, to a great extent inherent in modernity) is to condemn oneself to failure, a misunderstanding of the truth of art. At the same time, to consider such an art (from The Brothers Karamazov to M. Gibson's film The Passion of Christ), in which something is always pointed, something is sometimes not presented at the proper level, but something reflects always personal spiritual the search of the author, a priori seductive, not related to the real church life (the monastery of Dostoevsky, of course, is not a true monastery!), means, let in the form of the protection of true religiosity, podygrysh to those who would like to give all contemporary art to art irreligious, but militantly anti-religious.

Returning to the novel of Green as such, we note also its other features. "Power and glory" not only confronts life and life, strength and weakness, but also is a philosophical debatable novel. In it the framework of a powerful spiritual theme brings together worthy and unworthy, "realism" and allegory (parable), atheists and religious people, Catholics and Protestants, revolutionaries and reactionaries, as well as faith / disbelief, novel knowledge / ignorance of the author himself. All this diversity leads to one novel (but not semantic!) Root figure of a fugitive traveling. And it is difficult to say that religious is more important for Green - the fugitive, the martyr for the faith or the inhabitants of the terrible world, who, being reflected in him, regardless of their will, become personalities of a religious kind, part with their usual everyday masks. As a result, faith, passed through a complexly arranged filter of doubts, does not collapse. And the ending of the novel gives the first revealed miracle: the miracle of the resurrection, the return to life of what was destroyed in the state of Tabasco.

So, the "weak padre" is also a literary device that allows us to remember Dostoevsky (the image of Prince Myshkin in "The Idiot"), giving a chance to talk about turning the plot into a novel, as well as simple into a complex and unpredictable one. But, of course, behind this technique is seen not only the complication of simple, but also the philosophy of the reverse kind. It is again in the spirit of the twentieth century - the philosophy of simplification, the existentialization of Catholicism, the most radically expressed, as we know, by J.-P. Sartre and A. Camou, atheists, on the one hand, and the heresiarchs of the Roman Catholic world, on the other . However, let's pay tribute to Green: he does not force his Padre to see through everywhere the senseless viscosity under the bark of things and events (the novel "Nausea" by Sartre, 1940), nor to shoot out of hatred of bourgeois hypocritical denial of death in the sun itself (Camus, 1942 ).

The Green's fugitive is deprived and deprived of it step by step: the past, the walls of the temple, piety, costume, sleek hands, an ass, a breviary, a stone for the celebration of the liturgy, wine, life, death-confession, cemetery. He does not even have a name! How can you count these numerous "no", "not have", "not be"? Firstly - the ultimate approximation to yourself and the distance from "not yourself" - different types of pharisaism, including death thoughts about yourself as a possible holy. Secondly - the maximum ingrowth into life and, more importantly, death. What, after all, belongs to the hero in the novel in addition to his sins (they endlessly remind him of himself: meeting with the mother of his child and Brigitte herself, hef drinks a much needed wine for service, a love scene in the prison cell, etc.) and merciful re-bullet of the lieutenant?

The Padres only belong to death, something that, strictly speaking, one can not possess, but that at the same time is the highest, indisputable merit of his life. Death "drinking padre", refusing to flee to the free world and returning to confession to the murderer, voluntarily says "yes."

As in the case of Hamlet, with the Coral, "everything else ..." However, this silence of Death (the Spanish word "Silencio", derived at the entrance to the cemetery, is an important keynote of the novel) is telling. Speech, apparently, is about another, yet unknown holiness. It is not so much open to people (Mr. Tench, after a meeting with a stranger with a stranger in the first chapter, finds a book with a fascinating, indecent cover and an incomprehensible Latin text inside), something that may have been guessed by God, but confirmed by the first miracle.

Summarize.

Leaving the life, the story of Green, balancing on the verge of a desperate tragedy and parable, to life (the possibility of compiling a life from some preliminary materials) and returns.

Putting in the novel "Power and Glory" the question of holiness, Green ventured to artificially bring together his unconcerned life experience and the unconditionedness of Truth. In this, in his best novel, he demonstrated that touching even the book faith can gild everything that she touches.

"Strength and Glory" is Graham Greene's brilliant novel, an example of truly Christian literature. The priest in the age of persecution. A priest is a fornicator, an alcoholic, a coward ... Why did he stay in this country? He is despised (as he is himself, however), is persecuted like a beast, finally being killed. Sincere, even a tough story about sin, the ministry of Christ, holiness. The fact that holiness, in a sense, is unattractive. The fact that there is only one grief is not to be a saint. And most importantly: what the world considers a defeat, for Heaven - the greatest victory. Averintsev rightly spoke of the novel "The Power and Glory" Graham Greene as one of the most authentic evidences of XX century Christianity - Christianity, who left only the Cross. Here is a brilliant place from Graham Greene's novel "Power and Glory," in a sense conveying the very essence of Christianity: "I repent, Lord, forgive me all my sins ... I crucified you ... deserved your terrible punishment." He mixed up the words, thinking about something else. We pray not for such a death. He saw his shadow on the wall - some puzzling and ridiculously insignificant. How stupid it was to think that he had the courage to stay when all the others fled. What a ridiculous man I was, he thought, ridiculous and useless to anyone. I have done nothing for others. He could not have been born at all. His parents died - soon there will not even be any memory left for him. Maybe he is not worth the torment of hell. Tears streamed down his cheeks; At that moment, not a curse was terrible for him, even the fear of pain retreated somewhere. There is only a feeling of immense anguish, for he will appear before God with empty hands, so nothing is done. At that moment it seemed to him that it became easier to become a saint. This required only a little will and courage. He seemed to have missed his happiness, being late for a second to the agreed meeting place. Now he knew that in the final analysis, only one thing is important - to be a saint. "

Conclusion (Your Opinion of the Work)

"The title of the novel" Power and Glory "refers to the concluding words of the prayer of Our Father:" For yours is a kingdom and power and glory, and now and ever and forever and ever. Amen "Such an inspiring title ... But what" glory "can we talk about when the heroes live in a world that is as much as hell?" The book of the famous English writer Graham Greene was written in 1940. This is the last century, but like any classic, it's about never-ending and eternal. In the center of the book is the relationship of man and God.

The reader may even think that the action of "Power and Glory" is unfolding in some fantastic country, that the author offers us something like this fashionable now anti-utopia. But the historical outline of Graham Greene's book is absolutely real and reliable. We just do not know much about Mexico - serials, cowboys, deserts ... Meanwhile, at the beginning of the 20th century, an anti-feudal revolution took place in this country, and the new government placed the Catholic Church, and with it all Christians, in the same rigid position as the power of the Bolshevik believers in the Soviet Union.

But the persecution described in the novel is not the center of the narrative. In the center of the book is the relationship of man and God.

"Impatience around all at once disappeared. Over the years, everything lost meaning for him, except: "Who on the eve of his suffering took bread in the holy and venerable hands ..." Let them move there, along the forest path, here in the hut there was no movement. "Hoc est enim Corpus Meum" [this is my body (lat.)]. Light sighs were heard before him. The Lord descended to them in the flesh - for the first time in six years. "(Graham Greene" Power and Glory ")

The main character of the book is a Catholic priest, who, despite the order of the authorities, remained with his flock. He secretly serves the Mass, baptizes, confesses and communes. Being caught will not escape the death penalty.

The book could become another "novel about the hero," but the nameless padre is far from a hero. The people around him call him a "drunken priest" - and indeed, from loneliness and despair, the once prosperous, ordinary, moderately virtuous priest begins to drink, and during his wanderings even the child becomes accustomed to ...

But there are no more priests left in his state, he will leave - and the Church will not be in these places: "He is the only priest who will be remembered by the children. And from him they will learn their faith. But it was he, and not anyone else, who put the body of Christ in his mouth to these people. And if you leave from here, then God will disappear in all this space between the mountains and the sea. "

Heroes of Green live in a world as close to hell as possible, and the "weariness" of the historical background only emphasizes the universality of the situation. People have lost everything: order, prosperity, hope, the past and, possibly, the future. But they did not lose God.

The conflict between earthly and heavenly values in "Power and Glory" unfolds not only in the soul of the priest, but also between two people, growing to the level of ideological, philosophical. On the one hand, we see the "drinking padre," a man pitiful and feeble in many respects, but he grows into a heroic figure, for he believes that he is "the hand of God." On the other hand, he is a police lieutenant, much more morally impeccable, representing the ideas of social justice and progress, which, incidentally, is faced with the task of "destroying the last priest in the state." And this image is also heroic in its own way ...

A Christian is often unpleasant to the world for one of two reasons - either because he is faithful to Christ (which is uncomfortable for the world) or because he is wrong (and here the world is right). Grinovsky's hero is unpleasant for both reasons, and is especially unpleasant to the passionate and scrupulous lieutenant.

The lieutenant, a fiery revolutionary, dreams of social equality, brotherhood, justice, material well-being - about "heaven on earth." The priest urges his flock to love suffering ...

Dialogue, more precisely, the dispute between the police and the priest throughout the entire novel is conducted "in absentia", but in the end the author reduces the heroes, and in their last conversation there is no right and wrong ...

Expecting an apparently close death, the Padre only dreams of confession, but he, so many other people's confessions have accepted and so many other people's sins released, there is no one to confess ... except God Himself.

The end is shameless - the priest is shot, but he never gets to become a "real hero", although, perhaps, he has time to become a saint.

But closing the book, involuntarily remember the words of Christ: "My strength in weakness is accomplished."

In contrast, not entirely understandable, the novel "Power and Glory" published a year later contains, in addition to the already mentioned details, the main thing that is missing in the Roads of Lawlessness and gives the narrative unremitting tension. This is the figure of the "drinking padre", which is pursued by government soldiers. Hiding from them, this last in the state of Tabasco, a Catholic priest, sometimes performs his duty in a way not according to church canons. Having set himself outside the law (revolutionary, ecclesiastical), having parted with the prosperous pre-revolutionary image and the symbols of his spiritual power, tormented by his fatigue, sins, the duty to baptize and to take communion, step by step he moves on a donkey to meet solitude, betrayal, trap and death. At the time of the shooting, his powerlessness and defeat, he is shown by that single, weak, too human hero, which is only possible in reality, where inhumanity rules - the all-powerful gods of fear, heroics of abstract revolutionary duty, and various, including religious, pharisaism.

It seems that the miraculous transformation of the feuilleton and optional notes into a tragedy and something suffered, the personal struck Green himself, who exhausted himself, supporting himself with benzedrine, worked on "Power and Glory" in the afternoon, while in the first he wrote one of his entertaining novels ("The Trustee", The Confidential Agent, 1939 - about the agent of a foreign power D., who comes to London for a special assignment). Perhaps, therefore, he considered "Strength and Glory" his best work for the rest of his life. In any case, the novel not only made Green known, widely read, but also became its indirect response to Spanish events, to all the "strange" civil wars of the 1920s-1930s. Having taken the position of a Catholic writer (no matter how he perceived it), Green, it must be said, acknowledging in part the social truth of the revolution (such is his lieutenant in "Power and Glory"), showed some courage, since many English writers of the pre-war period adhered aggressively left views.

Next to "Power and Glory" can only be "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), E.Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War, which portrays the Stalinists, the atrocities of the people's feud, and the hero fulfilling his personal ("mountain", "guerrilla", "sacrificial", not understood by others, but guessed by his loving girl Maria) mission, aroused strong dislike of the Spanish Communists.

However, the pride of Green for his book was not supported by the Vatican. In 1953, the novel "Power and Glory" was included in the "index", a list of books not recommended to the Catholic.

Green did not accept direct participation in the war. He moved his family from Clapham to Oxford, while he himself divided the house between a Clapham mansion and (which Vivien did not know) a rented apartment in London. While in Bloomsbury at D. Glover, with some features of "good" Aida, he was pleased to learn that a bomb hit the family house in his absence. In April 1940, the writer settled in the newly formed Ministry of Information (this experience was beaten by him in the novel "Ministry of Fear", The Ministry of Fear, 1943), was on duty on the roofs during night bombardments. In July 1941, with the assistance of his sister Elizabeth (employee of the British secret service in 1938, the Green's uncle, Sir William Green - one of the founders of the Department of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty) Greene was enrolled in the personnel staff of MI6 as an officer № 59200. This as he spent 14 months in Liberia, already familiar to him, working under the cover of the colonial police (hence the line of service of Major Skobi in the novel "The Nature of the matter"), and then transferred from Freetown to London (1943). There before his resignation (1944) he served in the Portuguese sector of the V department of counterintelligence. His boss, and also with time and a friend became Kim Philby, by the end of 1944 led counterintelligence activities against the USSR. After escaping Philby, one of the most famous Soviet intelligence agents (or double kontrshpiona is believed by some British researchers), Moscow (1963), Greene wrote a sympathetic preface to his memoirs, "My silent war" (1968), which caused a wave of indignation in the British press, and also corresponded with the famous defector, gave him his books and during his visits to the USSR (1986-1988) even visited him personally.

"Strength and Glory" - one of the most meaningful novels of Green. It contains different artistic components, but in general this narrative is not only artistically thought out, spectacular, but also emotionally strong, intense. We believe this fiction of the Green Artist, and in part, in genuine excitement, we forget in a number of scenes about the Green-Artist. Unlike other contemporary writers, Green tackles a topic for which he has a certain entitlement and, when he says that, when he saw the suffering of Christians in Mexico, he first understood the essence of Catholicism with his heart, not with reason. It is no accident that until death, the writer considered "Power and Glory" his best novel.

To the Russian reader this very novel of Green is very close in a special way. In it, we also learn our own (the systematic, ruthless destruction of the Church, the church people, the Church itself as part of the soul of the primordially Russian man in the Leninist-Stalinist and Khrushchevite USSR), and the universality of the fate of the Church in recent times: a persecuted Church, a Church partly destroyed from within and in this capacity as a carrier of a certain spiritual responsibility for the rebellion against God. Therefore, arguments about religion, the meaning of revolution, the bright future, enlightenment of the "dark" peasantry and children that are conducted in the novel between the priest and the lieutenant, could well lead (and lead) the characters of Russian novels - in particular, the characters of "Doctor Zhivago", where , it must be said, just like Green's, a "weak hero" is derived. There are also other coincidences between the novel of Green and the described in the Gulag Archipelago by AI Solzhenitsyn, in the church historical literature (the secret service of the liturgy in the camps in the absence of canonically relying vestments, vessels, wine).

Green, as if referring to Russia, draws readers' attention to the fact that the features of pagan and new man are quaintly coexisting in the Mexican folk faith - elements of paganism and Christianity, calculation and naive childishness, fear and the ability to sacrifice themselves for another. But it is this small, increasingly lessened people in the conditions of revolutionary terror, unlike the more prosperous part of Mexican society (including the part of the prerevolutionary priesthood - this is the fate of the decreeed Padre Jose), who half-forgot about Christ or disowned Him, even wishes under threat of execution, baptize, burial, communion, giving shelter to the persecuted Padre. While there remains at least one, the "last" believer, we read in the novel, there is, according to the Providence of God, and one, the "last" priest, capable of giving him consolation. The latter applies even to the Grinov burglar ("gringo"), seemingly on his deathbed to think about repentance, confession, but then retreated under the weight of perfect murder from his intention. In this miracle - the only real miracle, shown in a novel far from all miracles: the last padre was shot, but then another last, and unnamed, priest appears who knocks on the door of the house where he is no longer expected.

Against the backdrop of the Mexican simple folk faith, everything else is shown, as it were, not native, but overseas in a direct and figurative sense. About England or Europe, lost terrestrial paradise on the other side of the ocean, dream dentist Tench, Lutheran Ler (who once fled from Germany to escape the military call), Mrs. Fellows. He dreams of getting to a foreign country and a runaway robber-killer. Unreal "abroad" now seems to the hero of the novel and his pre-revolutionary past - the seminar years in the US, receptions for church holidays, spectacular sermons. In a similar, somewhat alienated vein, the book is also represented in the novel, which is far from the surrounding characters of the non-bookable - everyday, ruthless, knowingly homeless - reality: the mother secretly read to her children the newly-written life of the martyr Juan, who, while being thoughtful, devout, pious, dies like a real hero with the words "Glory to Christ the King!"; Coral Fellowes gets acquainted with the textbooks sent from England with British history, the epic persecution of Catholics in it.

At the same time, however, the state of Tabasco and its capital city, the Beautiful City (Villa-Hermosa), from the Holy Land, the earthly life of the Savior, are still far away in space, but nevertheless something absolutely sacred, the signs of the Book of Books, emerges in them. Here there are Judah (mestizo), Pontius Pilate (hefe - chief of the city police), "high priest" of the revolution (lieutenant), his Mary Magdalene (Coral Fellows), his "robber unreasonable" (robber-American), guard (detachment of "Red Shirts" "), The Pharisees (a woman in prison, an old Indian woman in confession), the townspeople, concretized and unconcrete - earthly" gods "who always adapt to everything, as there is their own land, traversed on a donkey along and across, its own Calvary and characters not related to the gospel but her own actions and monologues indirectly commenting. It's amazing - in Tabasco, God is banned by the revolutionary law, expelled into the past, "died", "killed", shot. And God is everywhere! However, few people know this reality of God in everyday life because of their blindness. Neither does hef know about this (voluptuously drinking the wine of the Padre, who was so laboriously extracted for the celebration of the liturgy - while recalling how he received the first communion from a priest at the hands of a priest and as an adult he witnessed the execution of this clergyman) Ler, who as a Lutheran is called to read the Bible every day (in his pious, sheltered from the storms of history of the house, it remains the image of an ever-undisclosed hotel book), not to mention Lieutenant.

The image of the lieutenant is on one value pole of the novel. As an embodiment of certain principles, this nameless character is fairly consistent. At first examination, he is inhuman, ungodly, expressed in the language of the crackling revolutionary propaganda (for the future happiness of those living in the terrible poverty of children, one can shed no-one's old blood), the characters of other novels (FM Dostoevsky), and also materially understated. It is enough, in his perception, to take the land away from the landowners, to give a scientifically scientific explanation of the world and to destroy the ancient lie of the clerics about the "good, merciful God", how humanity will become better, more just. However, comparing the lieutenant with other characters that belong to the world of his dreams right now belong to the emphatically biological dimension of the narrative (mention of beetles, dogs, monkeys, vultures, stink of human bodies, the sickening smell of chloroform, the cast of the jaws of the Neandartal, etc.) the reader reveals that this is not only a materialist, but also a carrier of special holiness, in its own ideal principles.

The lieutenant is the personification of the religion of the revolution, of the religion of man, of religion without God. And as a religious person, he is endowed with the appropriate signs: he wears a uniform, cleans it, intelligently preaches his principles to adults and children, has an "icon" of the president on the wall, enters into "philosophical" debates, knows no weaknesses and is ready to make a personal choice (unlike from hef), contemptuously refers to everything overseas - from the bourgeoisness of the English, temporarily living in Mexico, to get rich, to jazz music, as if seeping through the air to a revolutionary country. In addition, he is an unconditional ascetic Puritan: he does not drink, does not know women (while he contemptuously treats the celibacy of the priest), cares for children; having a sparkling revolver showing his admiring teenagers, does not personally kill anyone (it is symbolic that his first shot is a "man-loving" shot at the head of a soldier who was already shot by a whole platoon); urges his small flock, a detachment of twenty-five people, to fulfill at any cost his mission.

The fugitive pursued by the lieutenant admits with some surprise the moral and human dignity of this bearer, in fact, of extra-moral and inhuman values. However, loving the words of all, all of humanity, he is not only incapable of affection for his neighbor (from his touch the child is hurt), the manifestation of love for a woman (portrayed almost as a scop), but also secretively cynical, for in his perception of the world , where people for some reason originated from animals, plunges into cold, emptiness and does not make sense. It is natural that the lieutenant is lonely, is not understood by others, much more earthly, human representatives of the revolutionary camp who drink, have fun with women, and treat their teeth. The expression "good man", twice pronounced in the course of the narrative (Judas-mestiz of the priest, the priest about the lieutenant), in the context of the whole novel, therefore begins to sound ambiguous.

How even more ambiguous it begins to sound in the application to other characters, people, and not bad, and not good - and knowing something about God (the dentist Tench is endowed with a certain observance, discernment, only he is allowed to see the scene of the shooting of the Padre), and under the yoke of uninterrupted cohesion of life circumstances, the blows of fate (Captain Fellows) who do not strive to know anything about Him. Involuntarily watching the death of the padre through the opening of the window, Tench seems to be unable to understand, to say what he has seen!

A special role in the novel in children and adolescents. If the adult world is polarized, shown as a whole, the children in the image of Green (in the life of children who are not very fond of) combine opposites. Actually, they are fighting for ideas - power, strength, glory of the modern godless state and powerless, weak priest, who even got the nickname "whiskey padre". But what they become, a fourteen-year-old Mexican boy yawning, bored, when his mother read aloud about holiness, or the fruit of the priest's sinful connection, a small Indian Brigitte (despite age, this girl and woman in one person) is not always known.

Yes, Louis in the final of the novel is depicted as changed. Padre, previously known to him as a drunkard, as a character in a boring life, dies, according to rumors, as a hero. This news, which passed from the book, the life story of another martyr (what could Mr. Tench tell the boy ?!), in life, the boy is enough to venture into the impossible. He spits from somewhere on top of the lieutenant and his revolver, and then becomes a witness to a miracle previously unrecognized by the Gospel book, the appearance, as from the ground, of another, and again not named by name, the "last priest." It turns out that life and life, fact and Faith are tied together, deeper than is usually believed.

Not so obvious is the future of Brigitta. In the light of the terrible death of another Indian girl (her distraught mother expects from the Padre almost a miracle of the resurrection of a child from the dead!), Her, the fruit of the priest's and Indian's lack of communication, is unlikely to expect anything good. In his own way the figure of Coral Fellows is mysterious. This daughter of the hero of the war, the henpecked husband and the owner of the non-revenue-producing "Banana Company" is shown by a girl-girl who gives shelter to a strange priest with a risk to life, supplies him with a drink. The plot of the Coral is little known. She is sensual, already at a young age causes a certain interest in men. She studies in absentia, reading history textbooks and sending school essays abroad. Then Coral disappears from the narrative so that in the end of the novel the reader will learn that the aged Fellows and his whining wife are ready to return to Europe alone, and consequently their daughter was lost. The only explanations for this death are the sorrowful words of the captain ("Exactly he revealed something to her"), as well as the mention of the note of the murderer-American (in it the criminal asks the Padre about the death-forgiveness of sins), with which the traitor-metis sends the padre to meet him persecutors.

This note, let's pay attention, is written on a scrap of paper, not known as caught by an American. On the reverse side of the line of the work Coral about Hamlet, coming from the legendary "rotten kingdom", which is a madman, then an actor, then a lover, then "holy", then the murderer acts, refusing to act, and also takes in the name of the trampled, a devoted Fatherhood for the Savior's mission. It exceeds the forces of a single person (Shakespeare's Hamlet perishes) and yet, in addition to his sinful will and direct participation, is carried out.

Based on these two circumstances, there is every reason to believe that Coral from a wayward creation somehow became a Christian. Perhaps, it is plausible that her death is connected with the gringo atrocities. Seen in one light, Coral is a strange Green fantasy on the theme of a sinner and a saint in a half-childish face (the influence of Dostoevsky?). Seen in the other - always in the depths of the secret, inscrutable story of the awakening of an individual soul: by the sudden awakening of her mercy, Coral wanted to save from death not only the priest, but also the villain, that is, fell victim to his kindness. In any case, the message "from the other world" in the form of an essay on Prince of Denmark (in other Green's novels the role of such a black label is played by the Pinky or Skobi plate) - an effective image. Here is Hamlet, not somewhere, but in the Mexican wilderness calling the priest after him on a voluntary death, and a hint of the always existing reverse side of events.

Greene has a more obvious one. The images of Louis, Coral in the novel are related to the question of what is holy, good news and how it responds (or does not respond) to a particular human heart. That is, Coral becomes in the novel of that precious, blood-colored pearl, which Padre did not expect to find on the banana plantation, but nevertheless, in addition to his will, weak, unable to make an active decision, put God in the light, gave a chance to sparkle. Therefore, the reference to "Hamlet" is connected by Coral not with the modern devil-sinner (Ophelia), but with the always open opportunity for everyone to be saved. In the language of Shakespeare's tragedy, this mystery of God's inscrutable ways, one can express Hamlet's famous words "Everything else is silence".

The riddle of the sacrifice Coral returns the reader to the question of the questions of the novel - and it is the novel, the literary work, and not the likeness of the life or the exact historical evidence (moreover, in the Roads of Lawlessness, Green's documentary book on Mexico, there is no biography of the martyr priest) .

Who should be considered a "drinking padre" - a sinner, a saint, a bearer of purely intellectual paradoxes, a parable hero, and even partly an autobiographical incarnation of the author himself? To these numerous and often contradictory questions, the novel circulating, giving the image of its main character directly and indirectly (through the eyes of various characters), from the outside and from within (his own consciousness), through facts and conjectures, gives equally contradictory answers. Padre - and then, and another, and the third.

Actually, this is whether we like it or not, Green's skill as a fiction writer and not at all an hagiographer. Behind him is not an instructive and finished story, but a number of questions, a chain of questions, answers to which seem to be and partly given, and partially absent. The creative productivity of the narrative based on the effect of knowledge / ignorance is a hidden motivator of the plot, and the contemporary of Green American T. Wilder with his distant Peru, the mystery of the death of travelers in the abyss ("The Bridge of King Louis"). You can say otherwise.