Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 03 Aug 2019

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

I think it’s true to say that there is a general impression that by the 1980s when Greene had reached his late 70s, he was somewhat coasting as a writer and that what he produced in those final years is rather negligible – certainly in comparison to his magnificent heyday. I think that sense of a writer who was past his peak is part of the reason why I’d never really considered reading Monsignor Quixote,  which he published in 1982 and which turned out to be his penultimate novel.

Then, not too long ago, I heard someone on a radio programme saying how much more enjoyable the book had been than she had expected and a very few days later and entirely coincidently I was offered a copy of the book by a friend who had decided to toss it out of their collection. I don’t think a coming together of this kind should be ignored and so I have finally got around to reading it.

Let me start by saying that I’m not going to be suggesting here that this is a great book or that it bears comparison to Greene’s magnificent back catalogue but I am going to suggest that it’s not a negligible effort – in fact, I suspect it would be a mistake to  dismiss anything Greene wrote as negligible. Monsignor Quixote has all the hallmarks of a writer rather enjoying himself, trying out a few ideas, without having the usual concerns of literary ‘worthiness’ or commercial appeal at the forefront of his mind.

As such it’s a book that’s balanced somewhere between a gentle fable and a slightly more substantial dialogue between the spiritual world of religion and the temporal concerns of politics. Famously, of course, Greene was a Catholic with Communist sympathies and it is these two sides of his own character and frame of mind that he’s playing out over the pages of this novel. And, I think, he does it with some charm and, in the context of a short book, in a way that kept me engaged and interested in the often theological debates that he plays around with.

The title will give you the strongest of indications that Greene is using Cervantes as a sort of framework for his tale of Father Quixote, an innocent abroad, who unintentionally gets promoted to be a Monsignor and finds himself on a tour of Spain which is not entirely dissimilar to that undertaken by the fictional knight of doleful countenance. He has his own Sancho Panza in the form of his friend the Communist ex-mayor of his home town and his trusty steed (his Rocinante) is a clapped-out Seat 600.

Greene sends his latter day chivalrous duo on a series of more or less absurd little adventures (that may or may not parallel those Cervantes created for his Don) that take in a night in a brothel, a trip to see a risqué movie, drunken evenings, lots of cheese, wine and plenty of good-humoured discussion along the way about their respective faiths and beliefs – Catholicism versus Communism. They swap books, confess deep-seated desires and beliefs and bond.

But there is another side to the book. This is only-just-post-Franco Spain and suspicion and authoritarianism run deeply in the civil structures and religious orders. Monsignor Quixote’s jaunt with the Communist mayor and reports of what he’s been getting up to filter back, via the police, to the church authorities and they are not amused. When Quixote gives help to a criminal on the run, that is the last straw and he’s brought back against his will to his home town where he’s kept locked up without his clothes.

But his time with the Mayor has given him a taste for his adventures and in the final section, a much darker episode, he sets off again with the mayor and in his attempts to prevent the desecration of a statue of the Virgin Mary he is struck down and gravely injured. In a final act of semi-conscious delirium he plays out the Tridentine Mass, administers an imaginary communion to his friend the Mayor, and dies in his arms.

Robert Towers who reviewed the book in The New York Times when it was published is right to say that “the book is not so much a novel as a whimsical meditation on faith and doubt and the varieties of human folly - a meditation with plenty of illustrations” and as such I really enjoyed it. There is a sort of accepting mellowness which is the moving spirit of the book that appealed to me and the bits I will take away are those moments when the two men simply sit, drink, speculate and eat cheese. Now that’s what life’s really all about……

The book is easy enough to find in Vintage Classics paperback for not very much and a hardback won’t break the bank either.

 

Terry Potter

August 2019