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The Power and the Glory (A Play) Paperback – January 6, 2011

by Dennis Cannan (Author), Pierre Bost (Author), Graham Greene (Collaborator)

3,484 ratings

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Tragedy

Denis Cannan and Pierre Bost adapted from Graham Greene.

Characters: 28 male 9female extras

Unit set frags. travellers.

In the revolutionary days of Mexico a priest decides to stay with his people in disguise rather than escape. It is little consolation however. For wherever the priest goes with the Mass and the Sacraments the police are sure to follow executing those who harbored him. Though he is a humanly weak priest with a past of ma

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Concord Theatricals
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 6, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0573614237
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0573614231
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.67 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.2 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,306,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #992 in Tragic Dramas & Plays (Books)
- #4,689 in American Dramas & Plays
- #11,644 in Theater (Books)

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Graham Greene

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Henry Graham Greene OM CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.

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Customers find this book a powerful read with masterful prose and a captivating story that explores deep moral significance. They appreciate how it shows the intricate nature of faith, with one review describing it as a potent exploration of darkness. The book receives mixed feedback regarding character development, with some praising the fully developed characters while others struggle to connect with them. Customers find the book thought-provoking, though some describe it as terribly sad.

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Readability Writing quality Story quality Faith Power Character development Sadness Morality

61 customers mention "Readability"57 positive4 negative

Customers find the book powerful and enjoyable, with one noting it's a short read with a lot of punch.

"It is a terribly sad, but good book. I had never read Graham Greene, although I had certainly heard of him...." Read more

"...and the Glory deserves its reputation as one of the great novels of the twentieth century...." Read more

"...I am glad to have read this book and enjoyed it. It was very engaging and thought-provoking...." Read more

"...A very recommended read." Read more

51 customers mention "Writing quality"38 positive13 negative

Customers praise the writing quality of the book, describing it as a masterful piece of prose and noting the author's superb style.

"...The praise I’ve seen for this book is well deserved. The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner." Read more

"...harbored about Mexico, Greene sets out the priest's struggles with great subtlety and precision, showing him advancing towards a nearly beatific..." Read more

"...In the Power and the Glory, these warring elements are beautifully, seamlessly fused in the person of the priest and the battered Mexican state..." Read more

"...I found it excruciating to read, but a valuable book to have read. It certainly is not a travel book on Mexico! Linda Sheean" Read more

46 customers mention "Story quality"37 positive9 negative

Customers find the book's story captivating and surprisingly suspenseful, with one customer noting its deep moral significance.

"...This was not a story to be rushed. I found myself reflecting on how prejudice can cloud our vision...." Read more

"This book was fascinating and mysterious, and it kept me wondering what would happen next...." Read more

"...All the characters were real, deep, and memorable. The takeaway from this book to help me be a better writer includes: 1...." Read more

"...Greene was a skilled story teller and he was good at leaving the discovery of meaning to us. That's how it should be...." Read more

31 customers mention "Faith"24 positive7 negative

Customers appreciate the book's exploration of faith, particularly its portrayal of humble and persistent devotion, while one customer notes how it delves into complex issues of good and evil.

"...By the evidence of his writing, Graham Greene was extraordinarily clear-eyed about humanity and decidedly secular in his personal behavior...." Read more

"...He rejected the evils of the state. He fulfilled his priestly duties, particularly in celebrating mass and giving confessions...." Read more

"...That theme, as so often with him, is the nature of goodness, especially as seen within the Catholic faith...." Read more

"...For example the peculiar Coral Fellows is not very believable but pages are spent early in the novel introducing her...." Read more

8 customers mention "Power"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book powerful, with one customer specifically noting that the power is also the power of God.

"...of showing things as they are without rose-tinted eyes, delivers a powerful book, with the characters taking a life of their own in the full scale..." Read more

"...The power is also the power of God, and as man can represent that...." Read more

"...And it's said to be his most powerful...." Read more

"...Bleak, powerful, honest writing at its best. Greene's best work in my view." Read more

24 customers mention "Character development"15 positive9 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development in the book, with some praising how sensitively the author creates fully developed characters, while others mention they could not relate to them.

"...He's an intriguing character, a man filled with love that's fueled by hate...." Read more

"...Maybe, in all that lies its excellence – that it portrays people so absolutely accurately – humans in all their violence, fickleness, frailty,..." Read more

"...The priest is a conflicted individual, but his character grows; in the beginning of the story he tries to escape on a boat, but at the conclusion,..." Read more

"...'s book, every character, however briefly present, is intensely encountered psychologically. Next to Lowry, Greene seems conventional and verbose...." Read more

13 customers mention "Sadness"6 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed reactions to the sadness in the book, with some finding it thought-provoking while others describe it as terribly sad.

"It is a terribly sad, but good book. I had never read Graham Greene, although I had certainly heard of him...." Read more

"...is 'orders of magnitude' superior to Greene's -- more vivid, more viscerally disturbing, more honest...." Read more

"...The story is dreary in so many ways, the whisky priest, the illegitimate child, the cruel jefe, the dead Indian infant, the betraying Mestizo, the..." Read more

"...but the stories are each in their own way quiet reflections, simultaneously sad and hopeful...." Read more

8 customers mention "Morality"5 positive3 negative

Customers have mixed reactions to the book's moral themes, with some appreciating the character's humility and compassion, while others find it cringeworthy.

"...This unnamed Lieutenant feels a fierce, abstract love for his countrymen, even though he's willing to take and shoot hostages from the villages he..." Read more

"...There is one big problem though: he is not the best example of piety...." Read more

"...In the ways that he kept his vocation, he preserved his dignity. He rejected the evils of the state...." Read more

"...His demonstration of humility, sacrifice and lack of self-care make him the embodiment of deep devotion to his profession and this novel a..." Read more

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Kimber
The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner.
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2025
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The Power and the Glory, set in 1930s Mexico during a period of state persecution against the Catholic Church, follows a whisky priest on the run and a police lieutenant who vows to rid his small corner of the world of the clergy. Their paths, fraught with danger and moral dilemmas, intersect with a group of unfortunate characters, each of whom profoundly impacts the fate of both men.

Mr. Tench was the whisky priest’s first encounter at a port where they both searched for their own version of freedom.

“A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.”

A dentist by trade, Mr. Tench, had come to Mexico from England nearly twenty years earlier and found the country to be a bit like the Hotel California — he’d checked out long ago but could never leave. As the doleful dentist and the camouflaged cleric share a glass of bootlegged brandy while waiting for a boat, fate intervenes and pulls the padre back into the bowels of a country from which he was not likely to escape.

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.”

This was not a story to be rushed. I found myself reflecting on how prejudice can cloud our vision. Life is vast, and we limit ourselves when we close our hearts to other perspectives. Some passages halted my reading, leaving me to gaze into the distance as I basked in their brilliance. The narrative was a potent exploration of darkness, with occasional rays of hope to light the way.

The praise I’ve seen for this book is well deserved. The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner.

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Dev
It is a terribly sad, but good book
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2017
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It is a terribly sad, but good book. I had never read Graham Greene, although I had certainly heard of him. I had earlier dismissed him as a sort of John Le Carre, writing about the complexities of international espionage. However, then Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa praised The Power and the Glory in Vargas Llosa's series of essays on various writers entitled The Truth of Lies, and so I thought that I would give the book a shot.

It is not an easy read nor, at first glance, an uplifting one, although one can seem moments of redemption and revelation laid out in the book. Everything is set in a Mexican state that I believe is meant to represent Tabasco during the 1920's, shortly after the Institutional Revolutionary Party's ascension to power. At that time, and in that state, it seems that the Mexican government was carrying out a pitiless purge of Roman Catholic priests, and although there were a number of believers, they observed the Catholic rites underground. It appears that the government effected the purge using philosophical observations akin to Lenin's observation that religion is the opiate of the masses.

Greene had spent time in Mexico prior to writing the novel, and wrote a memoir that expressed his loathing for the country and all that he saw. And certainly, both the foreigners and the natives living in the novel's setting are deeply unhappy. The former suffer from a profound sense of dislocation, and often dream of going home. The latter are oppressed by unbelievably cruel hardships, including political repression and hunger.

Vargas Llosa explained that the novel presented a conflict between the upright Lieutenant, who is totally committed to his secular beliefs and hopes to extirpate the church in order to do away with obscurantism in the hopes of bringing paradise to this world. His bite noire is a priest, who is sinful, guilty of fornicating and drinking and yet, much more human than the rigid Lieutenant.

However, I did not see it that way. The Lieutenant is admirable in his own way, particularly when compared to his corrupt and complacent superiors. However, Greene paints the Lieutenant in broad brush strokes and spends relatively little time with him. Greene spends far more time with the corrupted "whiskey-priest," and the real conflict is between the whisky-priest's attempts to discern the nature of his own calling, which he pursues with increasing diligence, which is remarkable considering horrific suffering that he passes through, including near starvation. Still, the whiskey priest cannot decide if he was closer to God when he was a younger priest, relatively well to do and with a parish, or if he is closer now, even if he spends the night in jail and even if he robs rotten meat from a dog because he is hungry.

For me, Greene uses the whiskey-priest to explore various theological conundrums. As the novel progresses, we see that the whiskey-priest is becoming weary of life, which is understandable because he has been on the run for eight years. And yet, when he returns to the very state where the police are chasing him, ostensibly to hear the last confession of a murderer, Greene makes clear that in part, the whiskey priest has begun to despair of this life. Thus, Greene asks us to ask if the priest's decision to return is a Christ-like gesture, in which he willingly sacrifices his own life for the betterment of another? Or it is a selfish gesture - in which his desire to die is in a way reflective of a selfish desire to cease living and thus cease suffering?

On that note, a remarkable aspect of the novel is the tremendous hatred that nearly every character feels towards this world. And yet, that contributes to the novel's power, because Christianity indeed deals and indeed to a degree condones a contempt for this life.

Regardless of the feelings that he may have harbored about Mexico, Greene sets out the priest's struggles with great subtlety and precision, showing him advancing towards a nearly beatific state at times while alternatively feeling repulsed and disgusted by the people around him. At each point, we are encouraged to ask if the priest is moving closer to God, or indeed farther away.

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Powerful, Glorious
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2005
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First published in England in 1940, The Power and the Glory deserves its reputation as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It comes close to being a perfectly realized work of art.

An unnamed priest is on the run in a revolutionary Mexican state that has outlawed the Catholic religion. All the other priests have fled, been shot, or forced to renounce their faith. The last practicing priest is hardly an exemplar of the breed; he's overly fond of brandy, and has fathered a daughter by a woman from his last parish. Feverish, shabby, and scared for his life, he forces himself to hear confession and dole out the host to the spiritually ravenous peasants he encounters in his wanderings.

As the priest wanders the state, he experiences a stripping away of his past identity. First to go are his dignity and social standing as a pampered parish priest. He misplaces his bible and over time loses the other ritual paraphernalia of his vocation. His shoes, pants and shirts wear out. He's constantly hungry, at one point fighting a crippled dog for a bone with a little meat left on it. Because his very presence brings danger to the villagers he's trying to serve, he can no longer take pride in the high price he pays for being God's remaining messenger. He realizes that martyrs aren't made from men like him. In the end, even the hope of final absolution and God's mercy are closed to him. Greene forces us to consider the following question: if you take away all that normally props up the sense of self, what's left that sustains us?

What the priest receives at his lowest points are the twin gifts of freedom and compassion. Locked in a crowded jail cell (in one of the great scenes in English literature), he realizes that he has nothing left to lose. The dogma he had been clinging to melts away, and his heart swells with compassion for the undesirables who surround him. Without illusion, he sees the particulars of his surroundings with new clarity. And he realizes that "when you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity." The fallen priest does what Jesus did: he goes so deeply into his humanity that he transcends it. Through suffering, he achieves in his fallen state the miracle and the mystery that eluded him when he adhered to the strict teachings of his faith.

The priest's nemesis is a soldier who is tasked to track him down. This unnamed Lieutenant feels a fierce, abstract love for his countrymen, even though he's willing to take and shoot hostages from the villages he suspects of sheltering the priest. The Lieutenant is determined to stamp out all vestiges of Catholicism in the state because he sees the church as complicit with the large landowners in oppressing his poor countrymen. He wants to give them real bread, and is enraged by their perverse insistence on receiving the ritual host that symbolizes the body of Christ. He's an intriguing character, a man filled with love that's fueled by hate. By the end of the book he begins to understand that even if he achieves his goals in furthering the revolution, personal peace will elude him.

By the evidence of his writing, Graham Greene was extraordinarily clear-eyed about humanity and decidedly secular in his personal behavior. Why was he obsessed with the rigid dogma of Catholicism, to which he converted as a young man, and why do so many of his major novels deal with worldly men tormented by their religious faith? His novels and autobiography provide some clues. Greene seemed to view life as a dark and painful progression - one reason he wrote with such insightful particularity about rural Mexico. He used Catholicism the way people use Elavil, Paxil or Zoloft, to keep at bay the despair that comes from feeling the human condition too intensely. At the social level, he distrusted man's ability, absent God, to make clear the human mystery and to relieve the sources of human suffering. He would have agreed with Kant that "out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, no straight thing can be built."

His faith helped him as a writer as well, providing a counterpoint to his keen reporter's eye and elevating the dilemmas of his characters to a higher moral plane. Catholicism, used as the argument for faith in the universal struggle between faith and unbelief, put a tension and a tensile strength into Greene's novels that would have been missing otherwise. In some of his other Catholic-themed novels (A Burnt-Out Case, The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair), the tension between faith and unbelief sometimes feels grafted on to the plot. In the Power and the Glory, these warring elements are beautifully, seamlessly fused in the person of the priest and the battered Mexican state through which he wanders. Which is, perhaps, the major reason this book is considered his masterpiece.

Although Greene needed faith, he needed even more to reveal the truth of the world as he saw it, which is why he didn't use his gifts to become a great Catholic apologist, becoming instead one of the greatest English-speaking novelists.

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Amazon Customer
Superb
Reviewed in India on November 25, 2018
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Best book. Best copy. Enjoy reading.

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Maurice Cottenceau
Conserver un livre
Reviewed in France on November 11, 2020
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professeur d'anglais retraité,je recherchais depuis longtemps cet ouvrage que j'avais étudié avec mes élèves et dont j'avais pêeté mon exemplaire personnel qui ne m'avait jamais été rendu !
L'exemplaire reçu est en excellent état et le délai de livraison remarquablement rapide

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Elisabetta Chiappa
Very nice book
Reviewed in Spain on April 4, 2017
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This book is ever actual and very nice to read. It's a must in every house and doesn't feel the time passing on. Very recomendable

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Vincenzo
Ottimo acquisto
Reviewed in Italy on September 21, 2018
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Ho trovato il libro che avevo letto in italiano per regalarlo a chi legge in inglese

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Beth
Excelente novela
Reviewed in Mexico on April 16, 2021
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Excelente novela de un período turbulento en México.
Entrega muy rápido por Amazon.

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The Power and the Glory (A Play) Paperback – January 6, 2011

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A classic in our times! It is very engaging!

Top reviews from the United States

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5.0 out of 5 stars The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner.

4.0 out of 5 stars It is a terribly sad, but good book

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, Glorious

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb

5.0 out of 5 stars Conserver un livre

5.0 out of 5 stars Very nice book

5.0 out of 5 stars Ottimo acquisto

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente novela

The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner.

It is a terribly sad, but good book

Powerful, Glorious

Superb

Conserver un livre

Very nice book

Ottimo acquisto

Excelente novela