A Display of Character

The true strength of Graham Greene, in my opinion, is the incredible characters that he creates for each of his works, from the novels to the short stories.  Greene has a penchant for displaying humanity in all of its glory, at the worst moments of the human experience and at the best of them.  His characters are highly complex and rarely do what we, the audience, expect them to.  They contradict themselves (Scobie from The Heart of the Matter is, in the words of George Orwell, “Two halves that do not fit together.”)  Greene does not have heroes and villains, and occasionally it is difficult to tell who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist.  So, when reading a novel like The Power and the Glory, it’s vital to keep in mind who we’re dealing with.

Graham Greene, ladies and gentlemen, here shown making faces at the camera.

This particular book if one in which you can count the major characters on one hand.  Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that a huge amount of time is spent developing each character into a hugely complex and sympathetic individual – particularly the main character, the whiskey priest.  However, the character that fascinated me in particular is the Lieutenant.

The most prominent feature of the Lieutenant is the fact that he is a character practically defined by irony.  His goal is to wipe out religion in the communist state that has been formed in Mexico, and obviously this leads him to oppose the whiskey priest, but of course Greene doesn’t stop there.  He opposes the Church because of their corruption and hypocrisy, feasting and drinking and espousing meaningless doctrine while their parishioners starve and live in squalor.  His whole backstory is a tale of how priests are corrupt and can't be trusted (or left alive, apparently).

Because come on, who can trust a face like that?

Well all right, that’s a pretty good reason; so this is the root of his goal to help and protect the common man of his state.  The irony comes when we take a step back and see what the Lieutenant is actually doing: in his effort to catch the priest, he is perfectly willing to not only take hostages from the priest’s home town, but to execute them if he doesn’t turn himself in to be executed.  To reiterate, these are the people he is trying to protect and save!  But the real mastery of Greene is that we can still sympathize with this character, because even after all of the atrocities that he commits to achieve his goal, the character is so masterfully crafted as to be if not relatable then at the very least understandable.

Now that you mention it, this whole sympathetic murderer thing is starting to get familiar...

This isn’t an isolated incident, of course – remember what I mentioned earlier about having trouble telling exactly who the antagonist is.  Greene has highly sympathetic villains in most of his works.  Take for example Blacker from A Hint of and Explanation; he is by all accounts a wretched, evil old man who, as it turns out, only wants to understand the meaning of community and companionship.  An even more ambiguous example arises in The Quiet American, in which Pyle can arguably be called the antagonist.  He is, after all, murdering innocents in an attempt to realize his foolish and misconceived idea of how the war in Vietnam should be.  In any other story he would probably be cackling madly as he ran off with the damsel in distress, but with Greene writing the book we sometimes have trouble remembering that this is actually the guy who’s blowing people up.

Pictured above: not Pyle

So, in short, let’s keep in mind exactly what it is that makes Graham Greene so great.  He crafts intricate and delicate plots, and his themes are always profound, but what truly drives the plot and what illustrates the theme is Greene’s impeccable character design.  Between the flawed heroes and the sympathetic villains, Greene attempts to display the best and the worst that humanity has to offer.  And while he may be brutal in his description of the bad, he only makes the good all that more sincere and profound.