The Lawless Roads: Review. Your grumpy uncle who doesn’t like…

Author: Graham Greene. Date of Publication: 1939. Pages: 224. Genre: Memoir, Travel

First off, Greene is a dour wet blanket in this book. He complains about the local cuisine (audacious for an Englishman). He complains in vaguely racist musings about the temperament of the people he meets. He complains about his lodgings. He complains about travel delays. He complains about his health. To a certain extent I can sympathize as even the greatest cathedrals in Europe feel stuffy when you have a head cold. But Greene has a remarkable ability to Negative Nancy even the smallest joys on his trip.

The cacti had no beauty — they were like some simple shorthand sign for such words as ‘barrenness’ and ‘drought’: you felt they were less the product than the cause of this dryness, that they had absorbed all the water there was in the land and held it as camels do in their green, aged, tubular bellies. Sometimes they flowered at the tip like a glowing cigar-end, but they had no more beauty even then: an unhealthy pink, like the icing in a cheap pastry-cook’s, the kind of sugar cake you leave upon the plate.
[Pg 42]

To set the historical scene, Graham Greene is traveling to Mexico in the late 1930s on behalf of the Catholic church. His cover is visiting the ruins in Palenque but his actual goal is to document the aftermath of the anti-clerical purges which took place under President Calles. Under President Cárdenas the persecution has abated, apart from in the state of Tabasco where resolute atheist Tomás Garrido Canabal holds sway. This setting would later serve as the basis for his novel The Power and The Glory. His journey begins on the border in Laredo, Texas. He goes south to Mexico City before taking a bumpy boat ride from Vera Cruz to Frontera in Tabasco. From there he enters Chiapas. He endures a torturous mule-back journey to Las Casas for Holy Week in which he is constantly bemoaning his stirrups being too short. Finally, he stops in Oaxaca on the way back to Mexico City.

From Boca del Monte at the cliff edge to Alta Luz there are only nine miles of track, and the altitude changes by more than a thousand feet; ears buzz with the descent and it is a shock at the little station to find yourself still looking down at the soaring birds. Summer is advancing: strawberries and lemons are for sale; and then you are in the bottom of the valley at Maltrata only to discover it is the beginning of another descent — to Santa Rosa, where the great scarlet tulipans are out, roses and magnolia in March, and bright yellow lemons on the trees…
[Pg. 93]

A sense of futility emanates from Greene’s account of Mexico during this time of upheaval. Well-meaning reforms are bungled by incompetent middlemen and leave those they were meant to help worse off than they were before. Warlords carve out spheres of influence and corruption is everywhere. Catholicism is persecuted inconsistently, with enforcement varying from state to state. Violence is casual and commonplace with bullet holes adorning many of the emptied churches. But ordinary life goes on; dully, indistinctly.

I went for a walk on shore; nothing to be seen but one dusty plaza with fruit-drink stalls and a bust of Obregón on a pillar, two dentists’ and a hairdresser’s. The vultures squatted on the roofs. It was like a place besieged by scavengers — sharks in the river and vultures in the streets.
[Pg. 107]

The big news during Greene’s stay is the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum concerns by the Cárdenas administration. Foreign governments retaliate and the peso’s value falls precipitously. The papers rail against the foreigners out to destroy Mexico and Greene begins to experience prejudice: unfriendly looks, snide remarks, shunning by formerly pleasant acquaintances. He describes the atmosphere as suffocating and oppressive. It’s a little unpleasant to read this memoir and be reminded of the state of current events around the world.

In the epilogue Greene returns to England. The Blitz is just beginning. He is sheltering in a convent with other civilians as air raid defense is prepared. Our intrepid traveller discovers that the lawless roads of a distant land lead back to his home.

Other Notes

• I went back and checked and sure enough The Nine Guardians by Rosario Castellanos which I reviewed a while back is also set in Chiapas during the 1930s. It’s a good contrast to the outsider perspective of Graham Greene, although more focused on land reforms than religion.
• The faith of a convert is a powerful thing. The Catholic church is a net good to Greene at all times and he doesn’t really entertain any of the motivations behind the anti-clerical movement. The Lawless Roads does a decent job of not hitting you over the head with religion though.
• I present The Most Stereotypical Interaction between an American and a European Traveler Ever:

At dinner the old gentleman couldn’t get over the joke of it: here I’d been walking miles around town and he’d gone all round in one hour by street car — for five cents American money. ‘But I like walking,’ I kept on telling him uselessly. ‘I’m going to tell them that back home,’ he said, ‘about my English friend who walked all day and saved five cents American.’
[Pg. 41]