--- product_id: 162291136 title: "The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)" price: "AED 80" currency: AED in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.ae/products/162291136-the-power-and-the-glory-penguin-classics store_origin: AE region: United Arab Emirates --- # The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) **Price:** AED 80 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) - **How much does it cost?** AED 80 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ae](https://www.desertcart.ae/products/162291136-the-power-and-the-glory-penguin-classics) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, in a new edition commemorating its 75th anniversary Seventy-five years ago, Graham Greene published The Power and the Glory, a moralist thriller that traces a line of influence back to Dostoyevsky and forward to Cormac McCarthy. Named one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century by Time magazine, it stands today as his masterpiece. Mexico, the late 1930s: A paramilitary group has outlawed the Catholic Church and is executing its clergy. Now the last priest is on the run, fleeing not just an unshakable police lieutenant but also his own wavering morals. As he scraps his way toward salvation, haunted by an affair from his past, the nameless “whiskey priest” is pulled between the bottle and the Bible, tempted to renounce his religion yet unable to ignore the higher calling he’s chosen. Timeless and unforgettable, The Power and the Glory is a stunning portrait of both physical and spiritual survival by a master dramatist of the human soul. Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Review: The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner. - 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. Review: It is a terribly sad, but good book - 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. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #9,673 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #165 in War Fiction (Books) #167 in Classic Literature & Fiction #997 in Literary Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 3,801 Reviews | ## Images ![The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81KtBdsOFGL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The elegant writing alone makes it a five-star winner. *by K***R on May 11, 2025* 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. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ It is a terribly sad, but good book *by D***V on April 26, 2017* 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. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Hardest Sort of Novel to Review ... *by G***O on October 17, 2011* ... is a novel that's obviously a work of exceptional literary craft but that you don't like. I don't like this novel, though I read it avidly. I'm far more comfortable with Graham Greene's "entertainments" -- the satirical novels that Greene himself considered lesser works -- than with his fictional expressions of his "Catholic Communist" conscience. That's what my aversion amounts to -- a distaste for Greene's philosophical message. I have the same problem with the novels of Vargas Llosa; the comic works like "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" please me immensely, but the political/ideological works like "Death in the Andes" repel me intellectually. "The Power and the Glory" is set in Latin America, as is "Our Man in Havana". Both novels portray societies burdened by corruption and violence under elitist tyrannies, the former a tyranny of ideology and the latter a tyranny of wealth. A huge gap separated the writing of the two books, that is, Green's experience of World War 2 and his partial disillusionment with 'quietist' Catholicism. The protagonist of "The Power and the Glory" is a fugitive priest, a 'wanted man' under the regime of would-be purifiers and saviors of the peasantry. These ideologues could just as easily be fascist as communist; the closest reality to their extremism might be the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot. The Priest -- a drinker, a "whiskey priest -- evades capture for years, until he is possibly the last priest still at large in a particularly vindictive anti-clerical state of southern Mexico. His only hope is to slip across the mountains into another state where anti-clericism isn't as extreme. He isn't entirely clear, however, whether his 'vocation' isn't martyrdom -- though he considers himself unworthy of such a beatification -- or else survival to be of service to parishioners. For a small, weak, drunkard of a man, the Priest shows incredible endurance and tenacity; in the end, he accepts betrayal as his fulfillment of his sacerdotal role. The obvious association of his inevitable sacrifice with that of Jesus Christ is the core message of the book. Unless the reader is willing to 'privilege' the Priest's commitment to Christian sanctity over the commitment to a religion of social engineering -- the ideology of the Lieutenant who pursues the Priest inexorably -- one wrong-headedness seems more or less as bad as another. There's a comparison to be made -- one that seems almost inevitable -- between "The Power and the Glory" and Malcolm Lowry's novel "Under the Volcano". Both novels are set in Mexico in the 1930s, under one of the most brutal 'caudillo' regimes. The central characters are both novels are drunkards and self-haters. Both 'heroes' are like moths attracted to their own obliteration, and both novels depict the core corruption of Power that ineluctably results in 'fascism' broadly understood. But Lowry's novel is 'orders of magnitude' superior to Greene's -- more vivid, more viscerally disturbing, more honest. In Lowry's book, every character, however briefly present, is intensely encountered psychologically. Next to Lowry, Greene seems conventional and verbose. But "Under the Volcano" is one of the "ten best" novels of the 20th C, in another league from anything Greene wrote or could have written. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.ae/products/162291136-the-power-and-the-glory-penguin-classics](https://www.desertcart.ae/products/162291136-the-power-and-the-glory-penguin-classics) --- *Product available on Desertcart United Arab Emirates* *Store origin: AE* *Last updated: 2026-06-07*