The Heart of the Matter (1948)

In the late 1970s, I worked in Freetown for several months. Before I went, a number of people told me to read this book as the best possible introduction to Freetown. Greene wrote this novel in the mid-1940s after assignment as an intelligence officer in Freetown during the early part of World War II. In 1977, many of the background details were still the same, like the menu at the British Club (no longer called that then) and even the waiters seemed to be the ones whom Greene described. Until rereading "The Heart of the Matter," I remembered nothing of the plot but the descriptions of Freetown. ( )

Major Scobie is a policeman in Colonial West Africa. He provides security for the area, he keeps a wary eye out for smugglers in ships putting to port, and he monitors the loyalty of local villagers for the home office. When he is done he comes home to a depressed wife and an otherwise empty house since the death of his daughter. He is a man destined for a sad end.

Graham Greene is a master storyteller. In the midst of the story, it doesn’t seem like much is happening. But so much boils just underneath the surface. And his characters all operate with the absolute certainty that no one knows their mind, but everyone is working angles against everyone else.

Bottom Line: A well-told story that may mean more after you’ve finished it continues to work on you.

4 bones!!!!! ( )

Book Circle Reads 35

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Graham Greene's masterpiece The Heart of the Matter tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity.

When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit and dishonor—a vortex leading directly to murder. As Scobie's world crumbles, his personal crisis makes for a novel that is suspenseful, fascinating, and, finally, tragic.

Originally published in 1948, The Heart of the Matter is the unforgettable portrait of one man, flawed yet heroic, destroyed and redeemed by a terrible conflict of passion and faith.

My Review: An excellent book. Simply magnificent writing, as always, but more than that the story is perfectly paced (a thing Greene's stories aren't always) and deeply emotional (another thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg Travels With My Aunt).

Greene himself didn't like the book, which was a species of roman à clef. I suspect, though I don't have proof, that he was simply uncomfortable at how much of his inner life he revealed in the book. Scobie's infidelity and his fraught relationship with the wife he's saddled with must have been bad reading for Mrs. Greene. But the essential conflict of the book is man versus church, the giant looming monster of judgment and hatred that is Catholicism. Greene's convert's zeal for the idiotic strictures, rules, and overarching dumb "philosophy" of the religion are tested here, and ultimately upheld, though the price of the struggle and the upholding aren't scanted in the text.

Stories require conflicts to make them interesting, and the essential question an author must address is "what's at stake here?" The more intense and vivid the answer to that question is, the more of an impact the story is able to make. Greene was fond of the story he tells here, that of an individual against his individuality. He told and retold the story. The state, the colonial power whose interests Scobie/Greene serves, is revealed in the text to be an uncaring and ungrateful master; the rules of the state are broken with remarkably few qualms when the stakes get high enough. It is the monolith of the oppressive church, admonishing Scobie of his "moral" failings and withholding "absolution of his sins", that he is in full rebellion against...and in the end it is the church that causes all parties the most trouble and pain.

Greene remained a believing Catholic. I read this book and was stumped as to why. The vileness of the hierarchy was so clear to me, I couldn't imagine why anyone would read it and not drop christianity on the spot. But no matter one's stance on the religion herein portrayed, there's no denying the power of the tension between authority and self in creating an engaging and passionate story. A must-read. ( )

A British officer stationed in West Africa is in an unloving marriage, has had his only child die, and is passed over for promotion. What to do, what to do. I know. Have a passionate affair with a nineteen year old that reminds him of his daughter. The primary themes seem to be failure and pity, I don’t understand why this book is as highly regarded as it is; it’s not awful but is far from great. As a forewarning, the racism starts a couple of pages in as well.

Quotes:
On happiness:
“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.”

On love vs. pity:
“Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need – and makes it worse?”

And this one:
“Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.”

On marriage:
“He never listened while his wife talked. He worked steadily to the even current of sound, but if a note of distress were struck he was aware of it at once. Like a wireless operator with a novel open in front of him, he could disregard every signal except the ship’s symbol and the SOS.”

On relationships, an interesting inversion:
“There is a Syrian poet who wrote, ‘Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.’”

On youth (and age):
“He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love. He felt the security of his age sitting there listening with a glass of gin in his hand and the rain coming down.” ( )

עוד אחת מדרמות המוסר המתפתלות של גרין​ ( )