Extract

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

A nameless whisky priest stumbles through the jungles and villages of 1930s Tabasco, where the Mexican state has outlawed the Church and a lieutenant hunts him with the cold patience of ideology. Graham Greene's 1940 novel is a pursuit story and a theological paradox: its hero is a drunkard, a coward, the father of an illegitimate child, and yet he is the last priest in the province, the only man who can offer the sacraments. He could escape across the border, and nearly does, but the call to minister keeps pulling him back. Greene understood that holiness has nothing to do with virtue. The power and the glory survive in a broken vessel precisely because grace has no interest in deserving.