See the movie instead. And I say this as someone with conflicted feelings about the Sorkin-Fincher product.

I haven't yet decided if reading this novel at the height of summer in the Philippines was supremely prescient or foolhardy. The first few chapters of this novel are alienating in their bleakness, approximating the aridity of a soul so far from grace. Graham Greene's prose sucks out all the oxygen from the story, leaving a nihilistic parable suspended in time.

The Power and the Glory is ostensibly grounded in a historical event. Set in the 1930's, it dramatizes the period when a wave of revolutionary fervor led to the persecution of Mexico's Catholic Church. Priests are hunted down--either forced to renounce their vows through marriage or executed. Graham Greene creates what is a essentially a man-on-the-run thriller here, as an unnamed character called "the Whisky Priest" struggles to elude capture in the countryside of rural Mexico. He is chased by a bloodhound simply known as "the Lieutenant," whose desire to annihilate the old, corrupt ways propels this all-consuming vendetta.

As characters go, the Whisky Priest is one of the most affecting characters I have ever encountered. Morally weak and changeable, he is hardly the example of noble martyrdom. In the time of plenty, he took advantage of people's veneration by indulging in drink and other proclivities, even fathering a child. Cosmic payback is upon him, however, because in a cruel trick of fate, he is now the last symbol of his religion for miles around. Mortal danger doesn't entirely cure him of his vices, yet he is unable to leave the people behind, so thirsty are they for rituals he had once taken for granted: confession, Communion, Mass.

Graham Greene seems to be one of those writers who are entirely consumed by overarching themes, so much so that his characters' specificity wilts in the face of them. The Whisky Priest is not simply an alcoholic clergyman who has fathered a child, he is the embodiment of every human frailty experienced in the 2,000 years of Christendom. Which goes to show great a writer he is that despite this absolutism--perhaps even because of it--The Power and Glory is wonderfully compassionate, nuanced, and dare I say, ecumenical.

A Catholic through conversion, Greene had once answered the question of his choice by saying, "I had to find a religion to measure my evil against." Redemption, therefore, lies not in its majesty but in the capacity for self-negation, needing the basest of circumstances to show its ultimate strength.

Reading this was tough going, and even during the most dramatic sequences I feel that some of the profoundness in the Whisky Priest's musings became lost on me. Greene never makes things easy for the reader, from beginning in medias res to refusing the recognizable categorizations of Virtue and Sin. Definitely a lot of things to unpack here, but so worth it.

Read on my blog.

In my quest to read more non-fiction this year, I went ahead and bought this book which I've been hearing about for a long time. As someone who gorges on police procedurals on a regular basis (let me tell you about my feelings for Idris Elba's Luther one of these days), the subject matter is right up my alley.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a series of long form essays by journalist Mary Roach that tackles the adventurous (after)lives of corpses that are used for scientific research. From the long-standing and ghoulish tradition of bodysnatching for medical schools to the relatively recent educational facility called the "body farm," Roach examines not only the mechanics of corpse-related experimentation, but also the ethical and practical implications of doing such work.

It took a while to get used to the conversational writing style; I expected some sort of journalistic distance in the POV but it ended up being a first-person narrative. I can understand why people might find it tiresome, but I think the authorial presence is a nice counterpoint to the subject matter itself. The moral implications of what humanity does to corpses and what it tells about us can get very alienating, so Roach's persona works well as an incredulous stand-in for the reader.

A great deal of research was obviously involved in the project, often discussing historical precedents and the follies scientists often go through in order to prove their hypotheses. Did you know that Thomas Edison designed an apparatus which aimed to prove that the soul is made up little bits of "etheric energy?" Now you do. Roach does a good job in sketching out the personalities of those who work in this kind of research, often relating episodes of inadvertent humor in the laboratory.

While I would've liked a little more in-depth detail, I understand that this book is aimed to be a cursory look into a branch of science that has often been overlooked for the sake of propriety. I found the sections relating to organ donation and people's intense emotional reaction to it particularly fascinating. Roach takes great pains to emphasize that society's hang-ups regarding the dead has nothing to do with our deceased loved ones. It's the sensibilities of the living that are often in turmoil.

Recommended only for those with a strong stomach because believe me, things can get pretty graphic within these pages.

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Originally posted on my blog..