The Power and the Glory

“The Power and the Glory’s nameless whisky priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anti-clerical Mexico. Roman Catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both; Greene’s imaginative immersion in both is triumphant. . . . The energy and grandeur of [Greene’s] finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class.” —John Updike
 
“Brilliant . . . a splendid achievement.” —The Atlantic Monthly
 
“As brilliantly written as it is magnificently conceived.” —Chicago Sun
 
“[Attracts] not only those who read for diversion and excitement, but those, too, who read for the pleasure of superb writing and shrewd contriving of story.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“A thriller—but also a novel of ideas . . . A work of the highest literary art . . . A book I would have simply died to write.” —Scott Turow, All Things Considered, NPR

Praise for Graham Greene
“The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling.” —V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London)
 
“In a class by himself . . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.” —William Golding
 
“A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy.” —The New York Times
 
“Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations. . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within.” —Norman Sherry, The Independent
 
“No serious writer of [the twentieth] century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene.” —Time
 
“One of the finest writers of any language.” —The Washington Post
 
“A superb storyteller—he had a talent for depicting local colour, a keen sense of the dramatic, an eye for dialogue, and skill in pacing his prose.” —The New York Times
 
“Graham Greene was a profound and experimental stylist.” —Time Out
 
“Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature.” —John le Carré
 
“Greene was a force beyond his books.” —Melvyn Bragg
 
“Greene’s fictional products are to conventional mystery stories what an Alfred Hitchcock exercise in cinematic suspense is to the ordinary Grade B Whodunit.” —Weekly Book Review
 
“Mr. Greene’s extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration . . . moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion.” —The Times (London)
 
“Graham Greene taught us to understand the social and economic cripples in our midst. He taught us to look at each other with new eyes. I don’t suppose his influence will ever disappear.” —Auberon Waugh, The Independent
 
“A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time.” —Newsweek