Critical Assessment "In this seriocomic offshoot of Cervantes's gigantic fable, we encounter once more that unstable compound of Catholic faith and Communist sympathy that has contributed its peculiar tension to so much of Greene's fiction. But what was once corrosive has become mellow, and the explosive potential of the mixture has been reduced to the benign effects of a robust nonvintage wine. Set is Spain at some point in the late 1960's (after the Second Vatican Council and the abolition of the Latin mass), this quasi novel recounts the adventures of a humble priest -- one of God's holy innocents -- [...]