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Graham Greene resisted the label of Catholic novelist all his life, which is faintly comic given that he wrote the most Catholic novel of the twentieth century. The Power and the Glory, published in 1940 after Greene's reporting trip through Tabasco and Chiapas, follows an unnamed priest - the famous "whisky priest" - on the run through a Mexican state where Catholicism has been outlawed, churches razed, and clergy given a choice between marriage, exile, or the firing squad. He is the last priest left, and he is a bad one: a drinker, vain about his former standing, father of a child by a village woman, and incapable of the full repentance his office demands because his gravest sin is tangled up with genuine love for his daughter.

That contradiction is the engine of the whole book, and it still runs beautifully. The priest performs his duties - hearing confessions, saying Mass in barns, baptising children for whatever pesos the poor can scrape together - while privately convinced of his own damnation. He is too frightened to seek martyrdom and too stubborn to abandon the people who need him, and Greene wrings extraordinary tension from that middle ground. When a dying man's confession lures him back into the trap he has spent the novel evading, the decision lands not as heroism but as something closer to exhausted duty, which is far more affecting. His pursuer, the lieutenant, is no cartoon persecutor either. He is an idealist who genuinely believes he is freeing the peasants from a church that exploited them, and the brief, almost tender exchanges between hunter and hunted in the final act are the novel's best pages.

Greene's prose works in short, percussive bursts - rapid spurts with air between them - and the pacing is closer to a thriller than to anything devotional. The heat, the carrion vultures, the rotting port towns: the physical world is rendered with a gritty economy that makes the theological weight feel earned rather than imposed. The novel's central insight, that grace operates through weakness rather than around it, never curdles into sermon because Greene keeps it embodied in incident. An old villager mistakes the priest's drunken weeping for holiness; the moment is funny, sad, and doctrinally loaded all at once.

The book is not without real problems, and they are worth naming. The plot, such as it is, amounts to a man walking in circles until he is caught, and stretches of the middle section - particularly the episodes among the expatriate Fellows and Lehr households - sag noticeably. These English and German interlopers feel imported from another novel entirely, and their function is never quite clear beyond giving Greene somewhere familiar to stand. More troubling to a modern reader is the mestizo informer, the novel's Judas figure, whose yellow fangs and whining treachery reprise a colonial habit of mind that treats mixed ancestry as moral diagnosis. Greene's Mexico is vivid, but it is a visitor's Mexico, filtered through an Englishman's distaste for the tropics, and the Indian characters who shelter the priest remain largely scenery. The novel survives these flaws - the moral architecture is too strong to collapse under them - but they date it in ways the prose does not.

It is also worth knowing how the book unsettles the very institution it appears to defend. The Vatican investigated it in the 1950s, with one consultant pronouncing it immoral, a product of a disturbed and audacious age - and one can see why. Greene gives the church's enemies the better arguments and the church's representative the worse character, then locates sanctity precisely in the gap. Pious readers wanting an edifying martyr will not find one; the priest goes to the wall convinced he has failed, his last muttered word ambiguous. Whether that ending constitutes redemption or merely a broken man dying as he lived remains genuinely contested, and the novel is richer for refusing to settle it.

Read it after the obvious Greenes - Brighton Rock for the melodrama, The Quiet American for the politics - and it will feel like the book those were rehearsing for. The whisky priest entered the language as a type, but the original is stranger and sadder than the stock character he spawned. This is a manhunt story where the chase matters less than the soul being chased, and eighty-odd years on, its central wager - that it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt, not the brave - has lost none of its sting.