I’m in Spain with a humble priest, a Communist mayor and an unreliable motor

Graham Greene has already had a book in this challenge (see here for review) but he gets another one, this time set in Spain. This is because I have been collecting his novels, but not always reading them, and also because he writes books set in many different countries – there will be one more before the challenge is over. I have bought his books in secondhand editions and they can often be acquired very cheaply because his works don’t seem to be that popular at the moment.

Monsignor Quixote is set in Spain in an unidentified time but post-Franco. As with a lot of this author’s works it is about religion and especially Roman Catholicism so it helps if you know a little bit about that. The book also references Don Quixote by Cervantes (my opinion of this book is in this blog) so it helps if you at least know the outline of that story. It’s a short book but I was absolutely captivated by it.

The title character is an unworldly priest who has been labouring away in an obscure country village for years, unnoticed and not wanting to be noticed. A visiting dignitary raises his status to Monsignor when Quixote does him a favour. The local bishop is jealous of this honour, which Quixote doesn’t want, and so the priest sets off on a road trip in his old car which he calls Rocinante, after the horse in Cervantes’ book, accompanied by the recently unelected Communist mayor whom he calls Sancho. The two of them encounter a variety of people, become involved in some unusual events and argue about the relative importance of their worldviews along the way. Quixote is always kind and forgiving and very often innocent, and his companion is more worldly and cynical. The friendship grows but the church and civil authorities misunderstand everything that has happened and deem Quixote to be mad.

There are any number of themes in this book. Friendship and understanding is definitely one, as is forgiveness and kindness. Quixote fears that he has failed and become a whisky priest (see The Power and The Glory for another of those – my review is here) but he always retains his faith in God, worrying that he has failed him. It becomes obvious, however, that Quixote is the only person in the book without ambition or a lust for power and that that makes him look mad in the eyes of society. The book explores belief and how much that should change lives and whether it really matters whether what we believe in is real. The ending is sad but inevitable. The author conveys the beauties of rural Spain well and the landscape plays an important part in the book.

I thought that this book was brilliantly written and that the author updated the Cervantes story very well. I am not sure that I had ever heard of this book before I acquired it but I shall now recommend it to all my friends who enjoy literary fiction. I’m not keeping the book and will pass it on but it’s one I shall remember for a long time and may even revisit in the future.