Monsignor Quixote - Graham Greene

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene is one of the most beautiful books I have read in recent times. It is a book on friendship, beliefs and doubts. Father Quixote and his friend the Mayor are the most endearing protagonists and you keep down the book at the end wishing their adventures had never ended. I remember thinking I would like to take up a journey like that myself across India.

Father Quixote and his friend are passionate people, both believing in divergent ideologies riddled by doubts held firmly in check. Sancho the Mayor is a communist and an atheist. They are an unlikely pair but no more unlikely than Don Quixote and his staid Sancho of Cervantes. Their friendship starts at a low point in both their lives when the mayor looses his Mayorship at the elections and the Father gets promoted to a Monsignor with prospects of ejection from his beloved El Tobaso which is too small a parish for a Monsignor. They decide then to travel across Spain in the Fathers old car named Rocinante. Don Quixote’s horse too is named Rocinante and the parallel that starts here is interestingly drawn through the book which traces the adventures of Father Quixote and his Mayor in the Rocinante.

The book is liberally interspersed with conversations about the church, the holy trinity and communism. It had me going to the Wiki to look up on Trotsky, the Spanish Inquisition and Generalissimo Franco and taking part in their debates. The mayor’s cynicism is treated with sympathy and opens our mind to a lot of questions that we take for granted. The most touching part of the book is the way Father Quixote is able to talk unreservedly in the Mayor’s presence, even to think with a freedom he doesn’t allow himself when alone. It is however Father Quixote’s innocence that gives the book its touch of humor.

Like Father Leopoldo says in the book, ‘Fact and fiction …. So difficult to distinguish’ by the end of the book you actually start wondering if Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were real people who had real adventures. It is a recurring theme of two unlikely people who connect, not because of their beliefs but because of something deeper than that. It is perhaps doubts and the questioning that bring people together. Many of the beautiful things in life seem to be a product of not accepting things as they are said to be. Father Quixote in one of his conversations with the Mayor rightly says that he reads all the books he does because he needs them to strengthen his beliefs. If he, like the Baker from El Tobaso had complete unquestioning faith he would not keep going back to St. Francis De Sales.

Note: The book has also been made into a movie starring Alec Guiness as Father Quixote