Interlude with the Lehrs : no surrender in the Power and the Glory

Abstract

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene describes the wanderings of an unnamed Catholic priest on the run in a persecuted part of Mexico during the late 1930s. The novel is based on Greene's own travel book, titled The Lawless Roads, in which we find descriptions of the author's observations as he travels across Mexico in 1938. Fiction in the novel and fact in the travel account parallel each other in various ways and many are the affinities of character, incident and place. For this reason, The Power and the Glory has a special relation to reality, for not only are the fictional characters and events treated as if they actually happened but there is an aesthetic narrative quality of telling the truth about it all.