The Power and the Glory

“But it wasn’t like England: the man said nothing at all, just stared malevolently up at Mr Tench, as if he had never had any dealings with the foreigner.”

Mr. Tench, the Englishman in exile, never forgets—or, more precisely, is never allowed to forget—that he’s a foreigner in his adopted homeland. The people, and the place itself, with its heat and dust, are hostile to his incursions. This characterization of a place far from one’s homeland being hot and dusty is a common trope in colonial literature.

“‘You know nothing,’ the stranger said fiercely. ‘That is what everyone says all the time—you do no good.’ The brandy had affected him. He said with monstrous bitterness, ‘I can hear them saying it all over the world.’”

The whisky priest, Mr. Tench’s “stranger,” wallows in bitterness and self-pity. The alcohol only augments his already intensely conflicted emotions: His faith wavers even as he risks his life to tend to the spiritual needs of the villagers and other believers.

“The children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was.”

The lieutenant, in contrast to the whisky priest, never wavers in his belief that life without the Church will inevitably be better: Children won’t grow up in the shadow of the Church’s authority, tainted by greed and corruption. He intends nothing less than to help build a new world order, wherein children will no longer live in ignorance and poverty. Ironically, he functions as a priestlike figure in bringing this message to the people.