Monsignor Quixote

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What Greene sets out to do is to throw both characters together on a journey through Spain in the same manner that Cervantes did with his characters.

A couple of light stain marks to the upper for-edge in no way affecting the pages themselves and therefore of no great consequence.As I read it, it occurred to me that the two main characters, Father Quixote and the Communist mayor, Sancho, must have represented two sides of GG's personality. In the subsequent course of events, Quixote and his companion have all sorts of funny and moving adventures along the lines of his ancestor's on their way through post- Franco Spain.

Greene’s picaresque novel, a take on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, is a delightful read (and mercifully, much shorter). There are not many people around us who will still treasure friendship and camaraderie even as they would be different from each other and this book is like a calm, cool and concise instruction on how we can still find a kinship, a sense of fellow-feeling with people in similar tastes and interests even as our beliefs would differ widely from each other. Mayor Sancho, who played the devil with gusto, was ever taunting Father Quixote's religious beliefs. In that case you must forgive our poor Stalin,” the Mayor said, “for perhaps only the Devil was responsible. And there is also his unlikely Sancho Panza, a Communist mayor, accompanying him on a reluctant holiday across the breadth of Spain in the wake of the death of Franco.As with Cervantes in Don Quixote, Greene in Monsignor Quixote deals very much with concepts of fact/fiction, mythology/reality, legend/actuality and in both novels, those lines are both blurred and questioned. In this novel, Greene uses almost the same technic in the dialogues between a roman catholic priest, father Quixote and a communist Mayor, obviously Sancho. It showed Greene's position cemented via transubstantiation (in a manner of speaking) of fiction into fact and of doubt into belief. Quixote here is Father Quixote, a Spanish village-priest and a supposed descendant of the original Don.