Father Quixote was peacefully tending to his parishioners at El Toboso when he received a letter from his bishop. The Holy See was promoting him into a monsignor, and all because he was endorsed by a bishop (a different one) who was once aided by Father Quixote in a time of need. This was a surprise, all the more for his superior who considered the priest's ways to be bent and misguided. He and the bishop did not always see eye to eye, but the Holy See had the final say and that's that.With his promotion, the now-Monsignor Quixote found himself vacillating about his new ministry. A new parish priest was sent to replace him and Father (he was still not used to be called Monsignor) Quixote took the opportunity to ask for some time off, a holiday where he could recover his wits and take things in stock. It's not everyday one gets to be elevated to a position one was not asking for. The bishop approved the request, obviously still reeling from the turn of events. How did Father Quixote maneuvered his way into this? It was hard for Father Quixote to be leaving El Toboso after all these years. But he had his marching orders. Leaving with him on his holiday was Mayor Enrique Zancas, also known as Sancho, an open communist and fresh from his defeat in the recent election in the village. The two of them were to ride in Father Quixote's old but beloved Seat 600, named Rocinante. They were bringing a lot of good old Manchegan wine.The journey of our two characters was a sally into the map and territory of spiritual and religious life. The romp across the Spanish landscapes framed Father Quixote and Mayor Sancho's constant philosophical exchanges, their endless debates between the merits and virtues of Catholic life and Marxism. The parallelism with Father Quixote's "ancestor" was apparent in the way theology was treated as a form of chivalry. In the same way the ancestor steeped himself in books of chivalry (and in the process may have irreversibly lost his mind), the priest learned the doctrines and teachings governing his religion and blindly stuck to them. For his part, the unbeliever and worldly Sancho always set off his communist ideals against the Catholic priest's belief. The interaction between the two was not always easy, but with banter and wine, the right mix of good chemistry, a close friendship developed between them. Their adventures "on the high roads of the world" consisted of set pieces that were always a riot of wit.Mayor Sancho, who played the devil with gusto, was ever taunting Father Quixote's religious beliefs. But one could also sense the devil's advocate in the character of the priest himself, who despaired: "How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?"Considered Graham Greene's last religious book, Monsignor Quixote first came out in 1982. In it, the novelist must have given a synthesis of his belief in God and the ways fiction can dramatize it. Greene's was not a faithful adaptation, but boy was it so faithful. Like belief in the reality of fiction, belief in a supreme being was predicated on how much reality the Author could offer his readers. The Catholic novelist relied on clever dialogues and beautiful ironies to deliver his point across. "[Don Quixote] was a fiction, my bishop says, in the mind of a writer...." "Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God."Like Father Quixote's ancestor, the character of this novel insisted on the recognition of his existence in fact, perhaps in the same way the novelist insisted on the existence of God. The literary imagination as metaphor for the religious imagination. With the cast-iron conviction of his ancestor who vehemently denied the truth behind the "fake Quixote", Father Quixote's passionate insistence on his own free will and self-determination lay at the very root of his religious belief. "Why are you always saddling me with my ancestor?" "I was only comparing—" "You talk about him at every opportunity, you pretend that my saints' books are like his books of chivalry, you compare our little adventures with his. Those Guardia were Guardia, not windmills. I am Father Quixote, and not Don Quixote. I tell you, I exist. My adventures are my own adventures, not his. I go my way—my way—not his. I have free will. I am not tethered to an ancestor who has been dead these four hundred years."The novel's climax was a cunning one. It showed Greene's position cemented via transubstantiation (in a manner of speaking) of fiction into fact and of doubt into belief. When it comes down to it, belief in something does not really require the existence of the thing one believes in. In the words of another priest in the novel, a Trappist monk: "I suppose Descartes brought me to the point where he brought himself—to faith. Fact or fiction—in the end you can't distinguish between them—you just have to choose."
Greene’s picaresque novel, a take on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, is a delightful read (and mercifully, much shorter).The newly minted Monsignor Quixote of La Mancha sets off on a trip across Spain with Communist ex-Mayor Sancho, and strangely encounter similar perils and pitfalls as their celebrated fictional namesakes of four centuries ago. The Bishop is ostensibly on a shopping trip to buy his new vestments and the ex-mayor is looking to get away and bury his hurt from losing the last town council election. In the back seat of their battered car, aptly named Rosinante, is an inexhaustible case of good Manchegan wine.Monsignor Quixote is firm in his Catholic faith but is anti-establishment, and so is his travelling companion. They enter into many discourses along the way, Quixote standing up for God and trouncing the Church, and Sancho pleading for Marx and dumping on the Politbureau. No subject is taboo: masturbation, the rhythm method, the withdrawal method, the Bible and Das Kapital. They read each other’s books and take pot shots at each other’s faiths; Sancho even has a theory about the Prodigal Son: he posits that the Prodigal got bored and disappointed upon his return to his father’s right wing wealth and fled back to the swineherd to live among the proletariat. Quixote compares the Holy Trinity to three bottles of wine from the same vintage – the same essence in three distinct entities. As they journey along it becomes clear that Sancho is the closet Capitalist, espousing fine wines, luxury hotels and good food, while the Monsignor represents the proletariat, reluctant to even announce his newly appointed promotion to bishop. Quixote is also naive, thinking that the movie his worldly companion takes him to, The Maiden’s Prayer, must be a religious one; he even chuckles at the graphic sex scenes not having known physical love.The Guardia, who constantly interrupt our heroes’ journey, stand for the windmills in the Cervantes chronicle as they tilt to the tune of every regime in Spain. In the eyes of the Church, Quixote is mad and must be put away, before he brings any more embarrassment through his ramblings around the countryside with a Communist, even seen exiting a pornographic movie theatre. And therein lies the thrust of the story: the struggle of the honest individual against the uncaring Establishment – a timeless theme that always grips the reader.The travellers’ individual philosophies that ooze out of the novel are priceless: “Man can’t live without a tranquilizer – opium, wine or religion,” “all the best people have been for awhile in prison,” “In a perfect world, what need would there be for hope?” and “I never pity the dead, I envy them.” There are many others.Greene’s Catholic novels have always posed the great question – can one be on the “outside” and still be classified as a believer? And his heroes have suffered tragically for taking that position. Monsignor Quixote is not spared this end either. However, I was heartened to read this book, for unlike in his other novels where protagonists wrestle with guilt and remorse in their dark worlds before arriving at redemption, Greene takes Quixote and Sancho on a grand tour of the Spanish countryside, fuelled with wine and camaraderie, and deposits them gently into their earned redemptive states. A light but thought provoking read.
What do You think about Monsignor Quixote (1983)?
I haven't read Don Quixote, so maybe I'm not getting the full depth of the references, but this seemed like a joke that got extended way past the point of being funny-a literary SNL skit that had about 20 seconds of humor tops. Father Quixote is a simple Spanish priest with a famous last name. He gets promoted to Monsignor through a chance encounter with a bishop and decides to go on a trip around Spain in his old car "Rocinante' with his friend the Communist ex-Mayor, who he calls Sancho. They drive, drink wine, argue about Catholicism and Marxist, drink some more, argue about the state of Franco's soul, get in trouble with the law, and drink more. It's bleak in a Greene-ian way, but out of habit rather than any good reason. Greene seems to be having a conversation trying to square his Roman Catholicism and his Leftist, but I'm not sure anybody should listen. Read The Quiet American instead.
—Michael Burnam-fink
This beautiful little book is a picaresque novel depicting the travels of fools and rogues all the while shimmering like a well cut diamond.More than any other writer I know, Greene subjugates style for story, and himself to what he wants to say. Cast on a spinnet of Cervantes Don Quixote, with the Bible and various communist tracts as bedfellows, this beautiful innocent wanders Spain with his Sancho Panza, in his little car, the seat 600. But it is not Spain that these two traverse but the whole mongrel depth and breadth of human goodness and aspiration- significantly Friendship, Belief, Religion, Doubt, Understanding, Death, Politics and Hypocrisy.Greene does not make the fatal error of sticking to the script- instead he does what all good writers from Shakespeare and Dickens to Updike and Amis do, and remembers the reader. After all, Cervantes work's 1000 pages of small print, by my estimate half a million words, and covers battles with flocks of sheep, smashing puppets mistaken for soldiers, and getting bounced in blankets. Greene keeps his eye on the main game- doubt- and plays that game superbly. In reading this book i have much better idea of what perturbed Greene himself.Paying tribute to the real Quixote's observation that "There are no birds this year in last year's nests". as meaning nothing , "but the beauty is enough"; rendering fiction as fact; and accepting that the real Quixote was a madman who was yet an idealist of the first water; Greene's Quixote refers to God as a "mosquito" to prayer as "wax in the eternal ear"; and doubt as being far superior to firm belief. Such beautiful lines: "Sancho, Sancho, we disagree too profoundly to dispute".Greene is the measure by which other writers should be judged.
—C.S. Boag
So this is "light Graham Greene" huh? Quite a change of pace from the others I've read, (The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American and The Heart of the Matter), but I liked it a lot, maybe even because of the tonal and stylistic change-up. It was breezy and nostalgic, with a great touch of tender affection between the two protagonists. It's actually just as Catholic a work as what I consider his most Catholic so far, Heart of the Matter, but here Greene doesn't deal with his religion in a mystifying, perseverating and in my opinion tedious way, one that is largely inaccessible to non-religious readers like me. Here, rather, he examines Catholicism holistically and much less personally. We don't see one man struggling with a specific dilemma of absolution, but rather a similar man struggling in general with his faith. (Quixote is much like Scobie, really, with similar doubt and despair -- I imagine that both of them are probably autobiographical in this respect.) This is, frankly, much more comprehensible and engaging for a non-Catholic. I love the references to Don Quixote and Miguel de Unamuno's Quixote essay, both of which I read over the summer (see my reviews here and here). I would say a working knowledge of Quixote's original adventures is vital to fully appreciating this one, though you can probably skip the Unamuno which is depressingly esoteric. The climax of Greene's book is absolutely rousing within the larger context of these works, and the last pages similarly heartbreaking. The entire tone of the book is perfect, both whimsical and unexpectedly weighty at times. The criticism of Catholicism (and to a lesser extent Stalinism) never feels mean-spirited. At its strongest it is more gentle mockery than scathing derision, of the type that only someone who really loves it after all can convey. One of my favorite lines is: "Father Quixote reproached himself for having spoken too freely. . . Bishops, just like the very poor and the uneducated, should be treated with a special prudence."To be sure, there is more than glib wisecracks going on here with respect to Greene's challenges to Catholicism, but all of the questioning feels sincere, more a result of concern than bitterness. There is the openly-addressed problem of faith and doubt, and Quixote's question of how valuable his purity can be when he has never known real temptation. There's an earnest struggle against the rigid, hypocritical hierarchy that constitutes the structure of the Catholic Church. But none of it feels like potshots, which endears both Greene and the book to me even more.All in all it's a beautiful little book, perhaps not an Important Work by a man who is increasingly rising in my esteem with each passing book, yet perfectly executed nonetheless. It captures the jovial whimsy of the original Quixote while including more theological questioning and still avoiding my major complaint of the original by being told in a brisk 200-or-so pages. Highly recommended for fans of both Greene and Quixote (and Unamuno, if any of you are out there. . . to become a fan of his check this out).Cross-posted at Not Bad Movie and Book Reviews.
—blakeR
