Graham Greene's answers to Prayer in The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory

In a comment on my previous post John Doyle wrote of an answer to fervent prayer that brought a difficult situation with it. I have had experience like that myself so I have no difficulty in accepting the truth of what he says laying aside the sceptical post hoc propter hoc with a little smile. Graham Greene was a man who believed in prayer and who writes about it convincingly. I’m thinking here of two books in particular, The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair. Excellent recollective reading at this time when death seems to want to crash our party, approaching with the friendly clink of his carry out. In the latter book Bendrix is saved it would seem by the prayer of his lover who offered to leave him and give herself to God in exchange for his life. God in Greene’s book is a literalist who highlights the passage in the Gospel ‘knock and it shall be opened unto you’ by having the front door blasted off its hinges on top of Bendrix and saving him from the falling rubble. During the Blitz of course. Generally in Greene’s books God is a near remote figure who cannot comment on individual cases and simultaneously has a sharp elbow.

It’s a novel of stalking with Bendrix setting a private detective after Sarah to find if she has a new lover after she abandons him. The detective and his boy are splendidly comic pathetic in the English manner. Weather as the not often gentle rain is a feature of this book as it is in ‘The Power’ which runs with the immediate sweat of Mexican jungle. Humidity, humility and a priest on the run clinging to his duty to the end. He has prayed that he will sacrifice his own last confession and communion and go to hell but that his daughter should be saved from the evil which he sees nascent in her. Does he get his wish? This is Greeneland so you won’t be surprised. Mr. Tench the dentist marooned in Mexico by the falling peso is another comic turn from a member of the chorus. There’s a Marxist policeman, an acolyte of Satan, who trails the Padre.

These are some of his best books which haven’t dated at all. He was never much better than this which sound depreciative but is not given the high standard of his work.