Book Review: The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene

The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“One came to believe in Heaven because one believed in hell.”

Once upon a time, around a hundred years ago, Catholicism was made illegal in Mexico. During the Calles persecution (aka Cristero War), priests were exiled or executed (or hid in forests and swamps for years), while churches and schools were closed down. For decades, baptisms and consecration of the dying were forbidden, and any house where nine or more gathered for mass was automatically transferred to the government.

Enter Graham Greene, whose 1938 trip throughout Mexico inspired one of his great Catholic novels, “The Power and The Glory” (1940). From Tabasco and Chiapas, to Oaxaca and Veracruz, Greene wrote about the scars left on the land and its people. Greene hates Mexico for the discomfort, the food that made him ill, and the casual violence all around. But at the same time, what comes across is a deep respect for the religiosity he bore witness to. “Here, one felt, was a real religion.”

Even in nonfiction, Greene’s skill for finding God in the ugly and unlikeliest people and places is evident. “This was the population of heaven - these aged, painful, and ignorant faces: they are human goodness.”

All sorts of misadventures occur: he interviews a general for a paper, travels on mules over mountains, seeks reprieve from loneliness by speaking with all who cross his path.
He finds various forms of Catholicism, from the gaudy golden cathedrals (“It was a place for prelates, not for prayer”) to the mountains where Indians committed minor massacres one day, then worshipped the next in churches bereft of the host. He finds a town where the voice of a saint “miraculously” speaks out of a wooden box, and visits a hidden convent with a mass grave, only discovered by crawling through a tiny hole in a wall.

It is perhaps the most unusual travelogue this reader has encountered, one written as if with the intent to scare away visitors, instead of encouraging them to come and visit. Greene’s Mexico is a grace-less place where farmers prostrate themselves on the ground with arms outstretched like a fallen Christ, and women crawl to the altar on their knees for salvation more desperately sought in fallen times. “The Lawless Roads” offers a vision of hell on earth, yet with glimmers of heaven, still.

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