The Lawless Roads (Twentieth-Century Classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)Reading The Lawless Roads reminded me of a comment from Albert Camus from his notebooks: 'What gives value to travel is its fear. It is the fact that when we are so far from our own country we are siezed by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits'.
This is Graham Greene in Mexico. Travelling through the dry, dusty, mosquito and tick fly riven states of Southern Mexico in the 1930s, a period when the Catholic Church was under severe persecution from the state, Green clings on to the two things that remind him of happier times and nations - his Englishness, and the Catholic Church. His prologue is set in England, the title of his book comes from a piece of verse, quoted at the start, by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir and throughout his turbulent journey he seeks solace in quintissentially English writers such as Trollope and William Cobbett.
It is evident that Greene loathes Mexico. At one point he writes of the country 'No hope anywhere. I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate'. He finds, during his travels, a Godless, immoral and violently dangerous state. He retains a colonial contempt for the natives he comes across with their 'expressionless brown eyes' and is mistrustful of everyone. He defends the under fire Catholicism with extraordinary bias, declaring the Catholic Church 'Perhaps the only body in the world today which consistently - and sometimes successfully opposes the totalitarian state'. Remember this was the same period as the Spanish Civil war.
He plunges the depths in Tabasco, a state where Catholic persecution was particularly strong - 'One felt one was drawing near to the centre of something - if it was only of darkness and abandonment'. And his personality undergoes a disturbing descent into increasing misery and intolerence. After travelling through numerous grisly towns (Puebla is the only place he has any affection for, the only place in Mexico Greene can imagine living in with 'some happiness'), being plagued by mosquitos and diarrhoea and undergoing hours on cripplingly uncomfortable muleback, he reaches rock bottom - 'It seemed to me that this wasn't a country to live in at all with only the head and desolation; it was a country to die and leave only ruins behind'.
But Greene's vitriolic prejudices against Mexico serve as a blackly creative vehicle to contain his bluntly honest and hatefully evocative prose style. A more dispassionate, cheerful writer would not be nearly as successful in dredging up in striking detail the climate of this sinister Mexican age. Greene also owes a great debt to Mexico, for it was his travels in hell that provided the inspiration for one of his greatest novels 'The Power and the Glory'. In The 'Lawless Roads' we briefly meet the characters in the later novel - the 'Whisky Priest', the sweating dentist, the 'Mestizo' with two yellow fangs. This baleful travelogue highlights why Greene was able to use Mexico as the canvas on which to paint 'The Power and the Glory', a masterful tale of oppression, persecution, death and redemption.

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