Reading time – The Lawless Roads

In light of my desperately inadequate ability to update this blog with anything approaching regularity, I thought I would branch out and attempt to use it for other purposes in an effort to encourage myself to be somewhat more productive.

So I’ve decided to use this space to document the books I’ve been reading; more specifically, to provide book reviews of a sort. I’m ashamed to say, that in the first three or four months in Japan, my reading rate dropped to negligible levels, and while it is currently somewhat more sustainable, these reviews will hopefully have the added benefit of encouraging me to do more of it. Looking ahead to the summer weeks with nothing much else to do at a student-less school, I can foresee the devouring of plenty more reading material anyway.

The Lawless Roads – Graham Greene

I first encountered Greene as a 15-year-old living in Mexico City. He is one of my mother’s favourite writers, and she thought it apt that I be introduced to him via his Mexico-set novel, The Power and the Glory. I was not immediately taken by it.

The details of the story are a little hazy in my mind now, but it deals with a Mexican Catholic priest on the run during the Cristero Wars in the country, the period in the late 1920s and ’30s where the Mexican government enacted a series of stringent anti-clerical reforms intended to curb the power of the church. Public acts of worship were essentially outlawed, churches were boarded up, and priests were forced to either denounce their vocation, or go into hiding. As you would expect, a backlash emerged in response, and the country experienced years of bloody fighting.

I remember the novel not having a particularly positive outlook on Mexico in general, and being quite depressing and downbeat about the country and its prospects. To some extent that chimed with the immature teenage part of me that occasionally pined for a rose-tinted image of England and who tended to lay the blame for all his problems at the convenient scapegoat of “Mexico”. Perhaps, conversely, this aspect of the novel appealing to my sensibilities at the time was the very thing that prohibited my enjoyment of the book. It depressed me.

I stayed away from Greene for a while, coming back to him eventually in my late teens, and discovering a powerful writer with an ability to portray characters entirely of their time and place, molded and influenced by their surroundings and its influences.

I often thought I should give The Power and the Glory another chance, reasoning that, at the time I read it, I wasn’t well-acquainted enough with the historical period it portrayed or mature enough to appreciate its themes. In preparation for giving it another read, I decided to try The Lawless Roads (known as Another Mexico in the US), Greene’s autobiographical account of his time in Mexico in the late 1930s which was to provide the basis for his novel.

Greene, a strong Catholic himself, was in Mexico to observe the anti-Catholic atmosphere and report back on it for the church. As such, he deals with the closed churches, the priests in hiding in the jungle, the secret masses taking place in people’s back rooms, the anti-clerical pronouncements of petty government officials.

There has been much debate as to the extent to which Greene’s Catholicism informed his writing, with many going as far as to class him as a “Catholic author”, a claim which he himself strongly denied. Here, in any case, Catholicism is by no means the only focus of the book, which is just as well, as I found these passages to be amongst the most wearying and frustrating to deal with. Greene makes no attempt to disguise his support for the church and his disdain for the government, and while that is by no means an unreasonable position to have, especially in light of some of the appalling things that were taking place in the country at the time, the way he expresses these positions is somewhat trite. Anywhere he encounters hardship or suffering, of any sort, he cannot help but wonder whether things would be better with the restoration of the Catholic church’s position in society. Undoubtedly, in many cases, that may very well be the case, but this does not excuse some of his reasoning. Early on he alludes to the re-distribution of the church’s vast wealth and property and laments the loss of this opulence as it denys the peasant and indigenous classes the sense of wonder and moral fortitude they require in such a harsh and godless landscape. I found this immensely condescending, bordering on the racist.

Yet despite this, the book acts as more of a general travel log of Greene’s progress through the country than as a pro-Catholic diatribe. It is a country and a journey that the author clearly does not enjoy, and seems to hold in contempt. Again, from a modern perspective, this takes on racist overtones at times and is clearly very much a product of a colonial mind-set.

His sometimes torturous methods of travelling around the country are described in full detail, and make for similarly heavy-going reading. One sequence in particular, involving days of uncomfortable, often feverish journey through the tropical forests of Chiapas on mule back is particularly trying. He spends days and pages trying to reach the magnificent ruins of Palenque, deep in the forest, forcing the reader to agonise over his journey with him, and then, on arrival, takes one brief look at them from afar, deems them to be underwhelming and refuses to approach them to explore. It is an infuriating conclusion to a scene that holds such promise by tantalising the reader with the expectation of a glorious description of an awe-inspiring vista.

Because despite these weaknesses and the overriding negative and depressing tone of the book, it is Greene’s ability to provide the reader with just that sort of desciption that redeems things. The sheer quality of Greene’s prose is a joy. He has a magnificent eye for a scene, and describes his encounters with those he meets on his travels with vivid personality and characterisation.

There is ultimately no overriding narrative to the book, no conclusions are reached, either on the Catholic situation or any other aspect of the country, and yet it is an enjoyable read, and a dazzling portrayal of a time and a place that seems so utterly alien to modern Mexico.

Its at times depressing and offensive tone means I won’t be rushing to re-read The Power and the Glory immediately, but I will certainly return to it in the future and am very keen to see how the pair sit together.