Conversational, Concise, Cinematic
Like a good preacher's sermon, The Power and the Glory is meant to be heard. We love listening to it, anyway. With brisk dialogue and just enough detail to form a picture, Greene keeps the narrative moving. Sure, he sometimes writes long sentences, but he breaks them up into concise clauses—rapid fire treats for the eyes and ears. Seriously, read this aloud:
He leant his head back against the wall and half closed his eyes—he remembered Holy Week in the old days when a stuffed Judas was hanging from the belfry and boys made clatter with tins and rattles as he swung out over the door. Old staid members of the congregation had sometimes raised objections: it was blasphemous, they said, to make this guy out of Our Lord's betrayer; but he had said nothing and let the practice continue—it seemed to him a good thing that the world's traitor should be made a figure of fun. It was too easy otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God—a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war. (2.1.294)
The paragraph has three relatively long sentences, but read aloud, it seems to be seven shorter ones. To the eye, the dashes, colon, and semi-colon convey closely-knit ideas. To the ear, the structure keeps the mind in motion, ready for the next idea to come. And to both, the selective use of descriptive words paints a picture in motion. The prose reads like a movie.
In more ways than one, actually. A lot of the book is dialogue. But don't worry: these are the sort of conversations you'd just have to eavesdrop on (or retweet) if you heard them in real life. See the Quotes section for examples.