Graham Greene belongs to the category of obsessive artists: all of his writing life he has seen the world in essentially the same way, and he has written his novels—twenty-four of them now—to give forms to that vision. This is in no sense a pejorative, or even a limiting judgment: some visions are important enough to demand, and to justify, a lifetime's attention, and Greene's achievement as a novelist is surely a function of his obsessive single-mindedness.

Greene's world has always been a battlefield on which two contrary principles—call them The Power and The Glory—eternally confront each other. The Power is all the world's big-battalions—all governments, police, organized crime, big business, political parties; it is always corrupt, and it always prevails. The Glory has been represented in the novels mainly by individual instances of Christian faith, though it has also appeared as political idealism, and even occasionally as love. Greene has never represented it as a counterpower in the world: the ecclesia triumphans has never been a part of his vision, and he seems equally unable to imagine an actual government that would be Glorious. Faith is not for him a way of winning, but a way of living with defeat…. (p. 32)

Monsignor Quixote is yet another restatement of Greene's obsession, this time in a short and parable-like form. The source of the parable is obvious in the title, and Greene has taken pains throughout the book to keep Don Quixote in the reader's mind…. The linking to Cervantes isn't systematic, but you're not likely to miss it.

Along the way Father Quixote's faith collides with the powers of the society through which he travels: the power of the Church, in the person of his bishop, and the power of the state, mainly in the members of the Guardia Civil. Like his namesake, he is threatened, beaten, taken for a madman, and locked up; and in the end, like the Don, he dies.

One can imagine how such a book might have come to be written. Greene goes on a tour of Spain with some Spanish friends (he names them in his dedication) and no doubt he reads Don Quixote as a preparation, as conscientious tourists do, in the hope that somehow that national classic will reveal something to him of the essential nature of Spanishness. And having made the journey and read the book, he decides to put the two together.

Described in that way, Monsignor Quixote sounds like an elderly jeux d'esprit, just an old novelist fooling around, keeping his hand in. And certainly the book does seem to be rather casually put together, though that is appropriate, after all, to the picaresque tradition to which it belongs. But what it has to say about Greene's obsessive themes is not casual, and certainly not fooling.

Greene has always located his novels out at the dark edge of human existence, somewhere between doubt and despair. But his most recent books, especially The Human Factor and Dr. Fischer of Geneva, seemed to me almost to go over that edge, into absolute despair. That despair was perhaps reasonable enough if you consider that these two books were about South African politics and the power of capitalist wealth; still, despair is beyond the limits of a religious perception of the world, and calls that perception into question. So I'm relieved to see that Monsignor Quixote is a swing back, away from despair toward doubt. Indeed, doubt is a principal topic of discussion in the book; and more than a topic, it is a value. Both the priest and his friend, the Communist, doubt the absolute systems to which they have committed themselves; and because they doubt, they are humane and decent men….

Clearly Monsignor Quixote, like most of Greene's other recent novels, is at once religious and political, though orthodox in neither. Greene's politics have always been hard to define: left-wing, certainly, and sharply critical of Western capitalism and imperialism, but distrustful of the left when it sought or seized power. There is no precise term for such an essentially critical political position, but perhaps Christian Anarchist comes as close as any for a world view that sees all human institutions as instruments of power, and all power as corrupt. (p. 33)

Sancho, who has the last word, ends the novel with two questions. He has been thinking that he had come to love Father Quixote, and that his love has survived the priest's death: "for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?" This may not be everybody's idea of an upbeat ending, but it is, like the whole novel, a kind of doubting affirmation: a world in which faith exists, even quixotic faith, is not a world to be despaired of, though one may—and indeed one must—doubt.

Don't take this positive note to mean that Greene has grown benign in his old age: the world he sees around him is still a fallen world, as his other recent publication shows. J'Accuse is a pamphlet that denounces the cruel injustices inflicted on a family of Greene's friends, who live near him on the Côte d'Azur. Greene finds in their daughter's extremely unpleasant divorce case evidences of police corruption, judicial malfeasance, and the influence of the Mafia. The pamphlet names names and makes explicit accusations, and Greene's publisher must have waited in some anxiety for the libel summonses to arrive, though I gather that all that has happened is that the pamphlet has been suppressed in Nice, and Greene has been fined for distributing it.

J'Accuse adds nothing to one's understanding of Greene's work, but it does offer an appealing view of Greene as Quixote, charging windmills of power in Nice. And knowing, of course, that he will fail, for what does power care about pamphlets? The case he reports is involuted, and the dark side of Nice remains murky; but I'm glad he wrote it, whatever the results. For it confirms the morality of his novel: it is better to be angry, even ineffectually angry, than to be indifferent, better to have faith in justice, even a doubting faith. Better windmills than nothing. (p. 34)