The importation of saxophones was banned. To protect the populace he also outlawed alcohol and jazz. Churches were destroyed and the stones used to pave roads. Canabal was determined to show that a well-run society was possible without allowing any place for religion. Tabasco was the most rabid persecutor and the Governor, Tomas Garrido Canabal, actually drove every priest out of the state. The campaign was more successful in some states than in others. The reason for the persecution was what the government called the Church’s greed and debauchery. The story is based on an actual event in Mexican history when, in 1926, then President Calles began a persecution of the Roman Catholic Church by burning churches and killing priests and, in general, creating a Godless country. And, heaven knows, there’s lots of it here. Part of my dilemma is that I’m not very religious and I found all the talk and speculation about sin and repentance and guilt and confession and forgiveness and being worthy of heaven rather foreign. Indeed, it’s not at all difficult to find statements like, “One of the finest novels of the 20th Century” applied to it. I read somewhere that it is on a list of the 500 greatest novels ever written. My other cause for reluctance about reviewing this novel is that it is so highly praised by so many critics and readers and I found it such hard going. My reading tastes run to more upbeat writers. Greene would be harassed by mental mosquitoes.'” One suspects that, even at the North Pole, Mr. Greene’s dyspeptic descriptions of the hotels, the meals, and the sanitary facilities of Mexico.’ The New York Times pointed out the strange fact that ‘wherever he went, ugliness stalked him and leered at him from things, and beasts and humans’, and that he appeared to be ‘one who infallibly attracts to himself bad food and bad smells and bad people.
“‘One tires’, wrote one reviewer,’ of Mr. Indeed, after reading this novel, I picked up a copy of “The Life of Graham Greene” by Norman Sherry, the famous 1989 biography and was rather amused to find the following statement, referring to “The Lawless Roads”, Greene’s earlier book about his travels in Mexico. To me he’s a rather dour, negative-sounding writer.
The first is that I don’t always find reading Graham Greene an exhilarating experience. The story is based on a true happening in history in Mexico back in the 1920s when the government ran a campaign of religious persecution and hundreds of priests were rounded up and murdered and their churches destroyed. It is with some trepidation that I set out to write a review of this famous novel about a Mexican priest on the run from the authorities who are out to kill him and all other Roman Catholic priests they find.
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