'The Penguin Lessons' and 'The Power and the Glory'

The same reckless ‘spirit of adventure’ which Tom Michell ‘felt as a boy’ impels him to visit 1970s South America in his autobiographical account, ‘The Penguin Lessons’ (2015). There in Uruguay, his childhood fantasy of living alongside a penguin comes to fruition, as he rescues a bird from an oil spill and smuggles his new companion across the border, through customs and into Argentina, where he teaches at St George’s boys’ boarding school. Like the special bond between man and dog, there exists a connection between boy and bird in the novel. At Michell’s school there’s ‘boyish skylarking with the seabird’ by the children, and between penguin and a shoeshine boy it’s ‘boy and bird, in a language of their own’.

As much as Michell maintains an insistence on the power of Fate throughout the novel, making references to ‘the unrolling of events’, as well as ‘the timing…ordained by destiny’, he equally asserts that humans have the power to exert influence through our own actions. After all, gaining some experience of self-reliance is one of Michell’s primary motivations in his voyage to South America. Michell as narrator is a self-professed ‘enthusiastic proponent of understanding how humans can live in genuinely sustainable ways’. The natural world is painted beautifully and delicately in the book, from the lovely species of jacaranda growing throughout Central and South America, to an expedition to the breathtaking Peninsula Valdés. Michell soberingly highlights the frequent cruelty of human behaviour. Certainly, the so-called civilisation of mankind leads to the deathly oil spill in the first instance at the start of the book, from which only a single penguin can be rescued out of an innumerable number of drowned penguins. 

The corrupt Argentinian government serves as a microcosm of human thoughtlessness, greed, and cruelty in ‘The Penguin Lessons’. Under the country's Perónist regime, there is rampant inflation to the detriment of both the ‘poor masses and the rich few’. The author compassionately captures the lives of the poor masses, way far out to the guachos and peons working in remote estancias. Michell is left wondering whether the long-awaited military coup which ousts Isobel Perón in the novel is a case of Argentina being brought ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’, and at any rate, he is left recalling Perónism as a ‘golden age of personal freedom’ before the military control came. Michell castigates mankind for ‘[devising] so much misery, and not just for our own species’, and he highlights the presence of 'Nature's descamisados'.

Michell sees himself in sober judgement, too, as ‘a young man in his selfish twenties’. At first, he hesitantly teeters and considers abandoning the penguin, taking the road ‘straight and smooth, sensible and trouble free’. He likewise questions his interference with the natural course of events by rescuing the penguin in the first instance. Michell first names the penguin Juan Salvador (John Saviour), although at his colleague’s insistence the penguin’s name becomes Juan Salvado (John Saved) amongst intimate friends and only Juan Salvador on formal occasions. ’Salvado or Salvador, saved or saviour? Both names were applicable in their way’ Michell ends up musing. But this interchange of names is significant, since now the penguin’s role as an enriching, lesson-giving Salvador is only recognised in a casual and private capacity. 

Anyhow, 'The Penguin Lessons' is a decidedly penguin-centric world. The novel’s narrator is ‘parent penguin-like’ at one point, and the college housekeeper’s gait is ‘not unlike that of a penguin’. ‘Perhaps an English boarding school (or one in South America) mirrors life in a penguin rookery more than most other forms of human society’, Michell comments. Juan Salvado is hardly wretched or timidly docile, but instead ‘inimitable, indomitable’ and ‘really very endearing’. The bird evokes a unique sense of ease with which humans can interact with and confide in him. Michell venerates Juan Salvado as ‘the pinnacle of Creation’s art’, and in swimming, the bird is praised for ‘a consummate mastery of [its] element’, an ‘exhibition of total mastery of three-dimensional space’.

What’s special and touching about the penguin is that the bird complicates ‘the tension that exists between the heart and the head in humans’ which intrinsically allows for the mistreatment of animals. Michell explains how the calculating human head is yet to recognise that ‘many animals have the capacity to understand and process information and experience emotions to a far more sophisticated degree than opinion currently holds’. On the other hand, the habitual emptiness of the human heart is filled by the penguin who is wholly doted upon by pupils, staff, and readers alike, and this captivating of our hearts is immutable, since any ‘vacancy left by…occupants [in the heart] never fills’. 

A similar tension is at work in ‘The Power and The Glory’ (1940) by Graham Greene, between the longing to do good and the committing of sins (Romans 7:19). Even if it had not been made explicit in its title, an allusion to a section of the Lord’s Prayer, Greene’s book concentres on Christianity. The tension between doing good and doing evil is surprisingly slack for the novel’s unnamed dissipated antihero priest. He is a self-espoused ‘whisky priest’ who lacks remorse for his misdemeanours - ‘every failure dropped out of sight and mind’, Greene writes. The priest recognises that he is ‘not a saint’ and his role as clergy is performative like a ‘play-actor’. He sees his ‘own natural face…unsuitable at the altar-rail’, and so tries to modify it with a success that brings ‘happiness…back to him like the taste of brandy’. 

The priest is menacingly recognised as a ‘danger’ and as a ’traitor to the republic’, though, where the story is set in the Southern Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, during a time of anti-clericalism. The priest is tenaciously being pursued by a police lieutenant, based on Tomás Garrido Canabal who served as governor and dictator of Tobasco. Fear in this police state is all-pervasive, from the priest’s ‘habitual uneasiness’, to the ‘terror [which] was always just behind [Mrs Fellows’] shoulder’. Eventually, the priest is betrayed and parodying Christ he has foreknowledge of this desertion as the narrator pens, ‘He knew. He was in the presence of Judas’. Also like Christ, the priest is convicted for his mere religious convictions alongside a more blatantly guilty criminal. Interestingly, the figure who betrays the priest is mesitzo and their dual heritage is reflective of their jarring welding together of church and state in bringing the priest into the republic’s captivity. 

Yet, church and state are not as antithetical as it would appear. There is considerable likeness between the priest and the lieutenant. Both characters are first introduced feeling resigned. The priest is first shown praying ‘with his brandied tongue’, ‘let me be caught soon…let me be caught’, whilst the lieutenant is similarly introduced walking with his colleagues in a way that means ‘he might have been chained to them unwillingly’. Greene writes that ‘there was something of a priest in [the lieutenant’s] observant walk’ and that the detective’s room is ‘as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell’. The priest makes a confession of sorts to the lieutenant who acts as a substitute priest towards the end of the book. The lieutenant is ‘a little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love’, wanting to give children the future of ‘a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose’. Again, the priest nurses a ‘secret love’ for his daughter Brigitta and utters many prayers for her. When the two meet, the priest admits he ‘felt at once’ the lieutenant is ‘a good man’ in response to which the lieutenant remarks, ‘I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man’. Greene explains how the ‘one belief’ the pair concede is the inevitability of death, of the fact of the matter that ‘we’ll all be dead in a hundred years’.

‘The Power and the Glory’ is infused with the concept of death, its epigraph is a Dryden quote referencing ephemerality, ‘th’ inclosure narrow’d’; the sagacious power/ Of hounds and death drew nearer every hour’. The novel’s landscape is inhospitable for life, the ‘blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust’. Vultures recur throughout the novel, scavenging for carrion and moving ‘like the black hand of a clock’. The oppressive heat ‘[drains]’ ‘memory’ and ‘childhood’ while the priest ‘[can] feel life retreating from him all the time’. The characters await the inevitable rainy season which is symbolic of death, the author writes how the rain ‘came perpendicularly down, with a sort of measured intensity, as if it were driving nails into a coffin lid’. The priest attests to the futility of human life saying, ’hope [is] an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill’.

Hope in the Catholic Church seems to be sounding its death knell in ‘The Power and the Glory’. A mother reads out the harrowing story of the young martyr Juan to her children from ‘the holy book’. Her son reacts, ‘I don’t believe a word of it’, and his father privately explains how Catholicism has a sentimental, ‘childhood’ significance for him and his wife. The lieutenant, on the other hand, has been left revulsed by the ‘churches of his boyhood’ with their hypocrisy, superstition, and exploitation. Certainly, in the novel Greene opposes Catholics who are not following ‘real religion’, but instead a ‘piety’, which exudes complacency and ‘unbearable pride’. As an exemplum of this ‘real religion’, the priest is able to recognise how ‘hate [is] just a failure of imagination’, and that ‘it needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye’ to see beauty in suffering and to not condemn those with ‘poor ignorant palates’ for their wrongdoings. Greene reveals how Catholicism is indestructible: atop of Tabasco’s plaza on the hill is a Treasury, the Presidencia, a dentist’s, the prison, and a steep street ‘past the back wall of a ruined church’, which still persistently exists. The novel’s contemporary religious persecution is resoundingly triumphed over in a sermon during which the priest instructs, ‘never get tired of suffering…that is all part of heaven - the preparation. Perhaps without [it], who can tell, you wouldn’t enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete’.

With thanks to http://marishapessl.com and a watercolour from perthlifecasting which I spliced together for the image.