BOOKS

Shades of disbelief

Patrick Marnham

A. the beginning of his second volume of autobiography, Ways of Escape, Graham Greene quoted a letter from Flaubert to his mother: 'As my body con- tinues on its journey, my thoughts keep tur- ning back and bury themselves in days Past'. One is reminded of this sentence in his new novel, Monsignor Quixote, in which he returns to several themes which have preoccupied him before.

Padre Quixote is the parish priest of El Toboso, a poor village somewhere in La Mancha: He is an unworldly man, rather afraid of his bishop who pays him little regard despite Quixote's distinguished ancestry. The bishop merely asks how any man can be descended from a fictional character. Father Quixote loves his parish, and his old motor, a Seat 600 which he calls 'Rocinante'. He is looked after by a ferocious housekeeper, Teresa, who serves him horsemeat steaks because he is too Poor to afford beef. His closest friend is the communist mayor of El Toboso who he teasingly calls 'Sancho'.

Their peaceful life is disturbed for ever When the Mercedes of a passing Italian bishop breaks down in El Toboso. So im- pressed is the bishop by the 'remarkable' steak served to him in Father Quixote's house, and by the priest's skill in mending his car (it has run out of petrol) that he ar- ranges for Quixote to be promoted to Monsignor'. The church in his view needs men of such practical ability. From the mo- ment of his promotion Monsignor Quix- ote's peace of mind is destroyed. His own bishop, displeased by his promotion, decides to place his parish in the care of a modernist young priest and Quixote departs on holiday. Since Sancho has lost an elec- tion and is no longer mayor of El Toboso they tour Spain together in Rocinante. Monsignor Quixote is the story of their travels.

Any fear that the author may have writ- ten a whimsical story recedes as the pair of travellers start a dialogue about their respective beliefs. The book is a gentle satire on modern Spain, on temporal and spiritual authority and, in particular, on Many of the attitudes displayed in the pre- sent debate between Christians and Marx- ists. This last is a natural subject for Greene but not one which he has written about Much before. It is curious for the way in Which the character of the old priest grows throughout the book and eventually raises the story from the level of near-farce into something more sombre.

Travelling in the company of an ardent

communist Quixote is put to various tests which provide some of the book's most amusing episodes. Sancho, who is delighted with the absurdity of Quixote's new digni- ty, insists on taking him to an ecclesiastical outfitters to purchase the purple bib and socks to which a monsignor is entitled. The shop is apparently owned by a member of Opus Dei, but Opus Dei's purple socks pro- ve to be both overpriced and unreliable and they soon develop holes. Next they go to a hotel in Salamanca which Sancho remembers from his days at the seminary. Quixote, who was never clever enough to attend the famous seminary at Salamanca, is overjoyed to be in the city of St John of the Cross. He is also delighted by the hotel. The patrona has been truly welcoming and there is a large staff of charming young women who have such sweet smiles. While Sancho wrestles with a bottle of champagne

brought by one of the girls Quixote cannot resist opening 'a little square envelope which was lying on Sancho's bed-side table — it made him think of his childhood and the tiny letters his mother would sometimes leave for him to read before sleep.

`There was an explosion, the cork crack- ed against the wall, and a fountain of cham- pagne missed the glass. Sancho swore and turned. "What on earth are you doing, father?"

'Father Quixote was blowing up a sausage shaped balloon. He squeezed the end with his fingers ... and the balloon ex- ploded ...'

When Quixote realises that he is in a brothel he is rather upset. But he is placed in a room on the third floor, where he will not be disturbed, and Sancho's joke backfires. Quixote spends a happy night reading Marx and deciding that he was real- ly a good man, whereas Sancho emerges from his night of toil in a distinctly bad mood. 'How dangerous it always is to try to recapture in middle age a scene from one's youth'.

Graham Greene has a confusing habit of describing himself in alternative interviews as 'a humanist' and 'a Catholic'. Catholic humanism is no longer a paradox, but this Catholic humanist also signs petitions in favour of the return to the old liturgy and so one is not surprised by the ingenuity of the political argument. Here Catholic and Marxist are reconciled by the need to be sceptical. 'How is it' says Quixote at one point, 'that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?' This is an image, incidentally, which works just as well in the opposite case, that of the sceptic haunted by belief. When Quixote has a terrifying dream it is that he has lost his disbelief, because Christ was rescued from the cross by the legions of angels and so became visibly divine. Eventually Sancho and Quixote find a common hero in the figure of Unamuno, the half-believing rec- tor of Salamanca, whose doubts kept San- cho in the seminary for an extra two years. There are further chords of sympathy in Quixote's uneasiness with the Church since the Vatican Council, and in Sancho's distrust of Euro-Communism, but they agree finally that Quixote is Catholic despite the Curia, while Sancho is Com- munist despite the Politburo.

Like many Marxists, Sancho suffers from paranoia and the idea forms in his mind that he is being pursued around Spain by the guardia civil, latterday windmills which it is useless to tilt against since they revolve with every wind; they were there under Franco and they are there still today. As the journey progresses this pursuit becomes more sinister. The moment of -trans- formation occurs when the character of Quixote breaks through the conventions of the plot during one of the book's funniest incidents. Father Quixote, under the im- pression that he is being hunted down by the secret police, takes refuge in the gruesome caballeros of a small bar. Here, perched on the seat, he is pinned down by the man with the penetrating eyes and thin lips. But this man is not a secret policeman. He is an undertaker who has just been bury- ing his parish priest, has robbed the coffin of its brass handles and urgently needs to make his confession. There is an extraor- dinary blend of farce and pathos about this episode, established almost entirely by the clipped conversational style of the priest which somehow lights up his kindly, troubl- ed and gentle character. Having given ab- solution, 'Father Quixote sat on the lavatory seat with a sense of exhaustion and inadequacy. He thought: I didn't say the right words. Why do I never find the right words? The man needed help and I recited a formula. God forgive me. Will someone only give me a formula too when I come to die?'

One is reminded of another priest hearing confession who could not find the right words, though this one was sitting in a stable not a lavatory.

'He wanted to say to this man, "Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open — it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy . .. Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed". But the habit of the confes- sional reasserted itself... He said "Mortal sin ...danger ...self-control," as if those words meant anything at all. He said, "Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys" '.

Father Quixote is not a sinful man like the 'whisky priest' of The Power and the Glory. When Sancho asks him if he has ever been in love with a woman he replies that he has been protected from such temptation, except in the case of St Teresa of Lisieux. But it is this protection which troubles him most. How can he pray to resist evil if he never feels temptation? And so he prays for temptation in order to be saved from his in- difference.

In a way Father Quixote is the man the whisky priest might have become if he had continued on his road to safety instead of turning back to the baited deathbed and his own martyrdom. If the whisky priest had ridden his mule onwards to the plump, scented matrons of Guatemala, with their hot chocolate and rich cakes, he too might have retired from the missions and ended his days in El Toboso. He too might have been puzzled like Father Quixote by the

passionate theological controversies that replaced the simple certainties of his youth. The worst sin he too committed might have been the comparison of the Holy Trinity with three bottles of wine, and the possible heresy because the third of the bottles, the Holy Ghost, was only a half.

But one can take the comparison too far. In Monsignor Quixote violence is played for laughs, the police bullets do not hit anyone in the back of the neck, and the drooping moustaches of the pistoleros turn out to be detachable. It is one of the achievements of the book that when 'the monsignor of the sorrowful countenance' approaches his eternal reward the comic mood can be sus- tained without in any way diminishing the sad power of the climax. Quixote dies while sleep walking through his last mass, said naturally, in the glorious old liturgy. And when he does so, it is to leave Sancho a haunted man, who wonders why it is 'that the hate of a man dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence — for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?'

The book is illuminated throughout with examples of the epigrams and similies which are so often the characteristic marks of Graham Greene's writing. A prayer is in- tended to lodge 'like wax in the Eternal ear'. Vodka wears off; so does belief. 'It's life, father, at its dirty work. Belief dies away like desire for a woman'. Again, 'In Spain one has always found that the best people have been for a while in prison'. And, 'A solitary laugh is so often a laugh of superiority'. There are other characteristic marks. One is the way in which innocence is discerned to be surviving, blithely, in the least promising circumstances. Another is the way in which the heroic central character emerges from beneath the ap- pearance of someone who is unremarkable, even drab. The plot eventually reveals the strength beneath. And in the old priest Mr Greene has accomplished what is suggested to be one of the novelist's most difficult tasks; he has made a good man as entertain- ing as a bad one.

The world portrayed in Monsignor Quix- ote is a world unscarred by serious persecu- tion or desperate poverty, it is a world of ordinary men not martyrs. It is one where a priest is promoted because his house keeper cooks horsemeat, and where he is suspend- ed because his bishop discovers that he has been giggling through a blue movie. It is a world where revolutionaries do not persecute Christians but merely try to con- vert them. But though it is a comfortable and amusing world it is still a place where there is good and evil, courage and fear. Monsignor Quixote is Graham Greene's best, most absorbing adept and effortless novel since he published Travels with my Aunt in 1969. And it deals with serious issues more effectively than any since The Comedians, which was published three years before that.