March 2023: Greene's The Power and the Glory and The Third Man, Trevor's and Wharton's early novels, Silas Marner

Elliot's Reading

March 2023

Elliot’s Reading

March 2023

Not much doubt that The Power and the Glory (1940) was Graham Greene’s best novel - drawing on all of his skills up to that point in his career: tense and exciting narrative, clearly delineated characters, use of exotic settings and qualities without condescension, occasional sharp-edged humor, interest in moral and even religious ideas and conflicts and all never burdening the plot with sanctimonious hectic or authorial interference. This great novels follows the course of the last few weeks in the life of an (unnamed?) Catholic priest in one of the Mexican states under complete control of the “red shirts” ( i.e., socialist/communist forces) who have banished all religious exercises and issued a death warrant over the lives of any priests remaining in the region. The protagonist leads us through a series of events and crises, constantly in need of shelter, food, clothing, and especially alcohol, as he’s what he himself dubs as a “whisky priest” (possibly endemic to the profession). He’s ineffectual as a leader and as a narrative hero, but he is a monument to suffering (physical and mental) and well aware of his violations of church law and etiquette (e.g., he has a young daughter from a brief relationship with a parishioner). Yet he is fully aware of and devoted to his responsibilities - risking his life to administer confessional for a dying robber/murderer, in one of the great scenes). Other great scenes abound as well: the trek trailed by the annoying “mestizo” who hopes to gain a reward for turning in this wanted man (or so it seems), the night in the foul, crowded prison cell, et al. The final chapter is a little weird as it breaks the 4th wall and we seem to be reading a published account of the priest’s execution at a time when it hasn’t yet taken place - confusing, a bit, but strangely evocative. I’m pretty sure this novel has been made into a film, and pretty sure it couldn’t capture the full set of emotions and ideas brought forth in the novel. 

The book jacket on the kind of old library edition claims that Alexandros Papadiamantis (whew) is the “greatest of modern Greek prose fiction writers.” Maybe so - I don’t know whom he’d be up against aside from Kazantzakas, which in itself is a surprise - why has Greek fiction fallen off the map? Translation difficulties (as his translator Peter Levi has implied)? In any event, AP’s novel The Murderess (1903) presents AP’s case. Is it a great novel? Well, not really - though it’s a peculiarly troubling novel that will draw readers along to its ghastly conclusion as it clocks in at about 120 pages. Itself a novel of crime and punishment: The protagonist, who goes by several names (is that typical of Greek writing/culture, or a peculiarity of this translation?) is being pursued by the police, wanted for several killings. t’s a tense and tight narrative and would probably translate well to cinema; Levi posits that the protagonist is an innocent victim, killing young women of all-female sibling families because the girls would only be a burden on the impoverished families because of laws requiring large dowries. Does that make sense? Few readers would come to - or sympathize with - that conclusion. In any event, contrary all expectation, we see quite early in this narrative that the woman - Hadoula, the simplest of her several name, is in fact guilty of several horrifying murders - of children no less! - so whatever her motives we have zero sympathy with/for her. It’s kind of a test for the reader, in a sense: Is it possible for a novelist to write about a serial killer of children and hold our interest (yes, in this case) and sympathy (a resounding no): Read at your own risk. 

I’ve many times counted William Trevor as one of the 3 greatest English-language story writers of the century (along w/ Alice Munro and John Updike); Trevor is known primarily for his Chekhovian depictions of life in Ireland, particularly in the smaller towns and villages. Among his most famous, for those looking to start reading his stories, count among his best as the Piano Tuner, Hill Bachelors, and Sacred Statues, about a would-be sculptor who has to give up his art and work as a road-crew laborer. Trevor also wrote more than a dozen novels, and these are not as well known nor, to be honest, well regarded. I’ve read only one, I think (Lucy Gault? Felicia’s Journey?), and that was a long time ago; I liked it, but it wasn’t Trevor at his best. Anyway, I’ve decided to take a closer look at his novels, and started w/ one of his earliest, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), and I found the novel, which I didn’t finish even though I got about 75% through, to be no better than its title. It’s Trevor, so it has some great moments, in fact the first chapter, in which the eponymous Eckdorf talks to death her assigned seat-mate on a flight to Dublin - an encounter that’s as good as some of the best Monte Python sketches. That said, the novel becomes a tangled and laborious mess: Mrs. E arrives in Dublin, checks into a rather seedy and ill-kept hotel, decides she wants to buy the place, and has strange encounters with the owner, her family, and the many denizens of Dublin who cross her path or who enter the abode - and no one can understand her interest of motive. The hotel is a comic setting as well, with some very insalubrious characters who pass through its doorway. All this is potentially of interest, but the story-telling is so convoluted, packed with characters that we meet intermittently, of incidents that are drawn out and reverted to time and again apparently to give us various perspectives - but - this is not Dubliners or Portrait or Ulysses, despite it’s ambitious format. I just found it was demanding too much of me, just to keep up: such an antithesis to Trevor’s usual precision, economy of style, insight, and sympathetic portrayal of thuds with ill fortune. 

I’ll give some unusual advice regarding literature and film: As for Graham Greene’s 1949 novel, The Third Man, see the movie first (and if it’s one or the other, see the movie, dir. Carol Greed, 1949). Not that GG wasn’t aware of this impulse. The novel is quite short and densely packed with plot, and w/ good reason, as it was written almost as a screenplay to guide Reed et al. through the narrative. Sometimes it’s hard to follow - in part because GG chose to have story narrated in first person by one of the characters (Holley, or Rollo, Martins), in part because there’s so much plot to hold in mind, in part because some of the greatest scenes are far less vividl and memorable than the scenes on film (the chase through Vienna sewers; the Ferris wheel and the Welles cameo, the closing shot at the funeral), and in part because these guys knew what they were doing and the film comes alive whereas sometimes the short novel bumps along. No great surprise here: in the preface to the novel GG explains some of this, how the novel was written with film in mind, and in fact he suggests that “it was never meant to be read” but only to be seen: Reader, pass by. 

I remember reading George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) in 8th grade and hating it (though not as much as I hated the 9th-grade novel, Ivanhoe), and looking back I wonder how they could have made the novel itself feel and seem so bad: they certainly couldn’t let us read about the death of an opium addict. They couldn’t have expected us to parse prose passages that confound me to this day. We couldn’t have seen this as a story of moral redemption, of the evils of the judicial and caste system inlace in the 19th C. Would we even have sensed that it was also a novel about social ostracism and bullying and shaming, topics that might have interested us. No, none of the above  - and coming back to this novel in late life I can easily see why it’s a classing - not GE’s greatest work (Middlemarch will wear that crown) but perhaps her most accessible (and teachable, if my jr. high English teachers had a dram of intelligence) - really focused closely on one set of social relations - most notably Silas’s love for his adopted daughter, Eppie - and to a lesser extent the marriage of Godfrey and Nancy Cass. Eliot keeps the focus tight, unlike her more grand and ambitious works, and as a result it’s more emotionally powerful: Who, aside from an 8th-grader pressed into service, can fail to choke up when Silas speaks trust to power and his daughter, within a world of avarice and status-seeking, rejects an offer to educate her to become one of the “betters”? 

Edith Wharton is without question one of America’s greatest 20th-century writer of fiction, though it took her some time to gain the recognition she deserved. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902) was hardly her first work of fiction - from what I’ve read she published numerous stories in Scribner’s, a great literary journal in its day, plus at least one story collection and one poetry collection; yes, she was extremely well-connected, but that can get you only so far once you’re in the door. Most of all, VofD (it’s 2 volumes, each of about 135 pp, and I read about 25% through, no more), is a so-called “bildungsroman,” a novel about the “education” of a young person, generally following a course leading from troubled, impoverished childhood to fame, wealth, or recognition later in life - the pattern followed today most often by confessional memoirs and in the 19th and 20th centuries by great novels such as Buddenbrooks, Young Werther, Great Expectations., and the list could go on. The problem for Wharton is that, though she had an excellent eye for period decor and a clear and controlled literary style, she never develops any action of significant conflict in her debut novel - that she learned quickly is obvious in that her 2nd novel, I believe, House of Mirth. VofD for 100 or so pp follows a young man named Ono from a deprived boyhood and, via some poorly explained change in his life circumstances, to a city to further his education - and he seems to be destined for a career in the church, maybe to become a Bishop - all well and good but there’s no particular crisis of conflict that engages us and makes feel for Odo: He’s a vehicle for Wharton’s many fine descriptive passages but the novel - 2 volumes! - just plugs along without character development, plot, or conflict. It’s no wonder VlofD is seldom read or discussed today -the wonder is how Wharton advanced so far and so fast in her literary career. 

It’s amazing how a truly and inarguable a genius of the short-story genre could be so mediocre at best at writing a novel; I’m thinking here of William Trevor, one of the great story writers of our era, and two of his early- to mid-career novels, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Niell’s Hotel (see previous post) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), which I found to be trivial, sometimes preposterous, and just really hard to make sense of as we follow, sort of, the eponymous Gomez as she has a religious awakening in her homeland (Jamaica) and travels to England where she takes demeaning and ill-paying jobs and tries to spout her religious doctrine to a # of uninterested and sometimes dangerous people and, you know what?, I’ve made the novel sound better than it actually is, go figure: I had trouble following it or caring about any of the willfully eccentric characters and felt no desire to study the weavings of the plot in and as we learn, kinda, of the various characters who live with our near Mrs. G on a London street designated for abandonment and reconstruction. I just didn’t care, and didn’t finish, and hope to someday go back to Trevor’s stories so that I can remember and honor him when at his best.