“If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.”

Published in 1948, this book is a psychological character study of Henry Scobie, a British police official living with his wife in Sierra Leone in 1942. He has recently been passed over for promotion. His wife is unhappy. He borrows money from a corrupt individual to send her to South Africa, setting off a spiral of poor choices. He meets a young widow who reminds him of his deceased daughter. “He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.”

Greene excels at describing flawed individuals and their struggles. He puts the reader into Scobie’s mind. Scobie, a Catholic, is consumed by guilt for his choices, though he cannot seem to extract himself from his dilemma. He uses the excuse that he is acting out of love, but the reader will discern that love is not the source. This book portrays the futility of trying to predict what will happen as a result of our actions.
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I suppose the rusted handcuffs that Scobie kept in his office were the symbol of his belief that he was no longer worthy of doing his job, just as the broken rosary in his desk, and later in his pocket, was the symbol of his broken faith.

"Theodicy, the intolerable struggle to make sense of God's Providence in a world of pain and sin." P. x

"The books Catholic writhings were much discussed at the time of its publication. George Orwell, reviewing the novel in the New Yorker, formulated an objection which is difficult to counter: 'Scully is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is--that is, a man whose Chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain--he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.' " P.xii

It's hard to argue with Orwell's review. This book is about a police commissioner (who's a Catholic) of a town on the west coast of Africa during WWII. There's smuggling of diamonds going on, and there's a kind of adultery that's going on that's rather hard to believe in. (It's like everyone is so bored so let's have an affair.) All the white people have (black) boys as "stewards," read "servants." The cowardly protagonist can't live with himself so he packs it all in and kills himself. ( )

When you get right down to the heart of the matter, the heart is difficult to know and even more difficult to control. A good man can do bad things, and a bad man can get away with murder. Henry Scobie is a good man, in fact a rarer thing, a good policeman, who finds himself trapped in a situation in which there is no way out that won’t damage someone. Henry Scobie is not a man who is comfortable with damaging someone else to save himself. In fact, Greene seems to think it is ironically his very goodness that dooms him.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself and impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Henry carries this capacity like a millstone. He finds himself damned for being human, for being frail, and he comes to believe that he has failed the ultimate test. Like Abraham with Isaac, he has been asked to put his love for God above his love for the human beings he sees as being in his care, and he finds himself incapable of doing so.

He seems to feel, as well, that the suffering is his fate, unavoidable as breathing.

He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.

Graham Greene has written a staggering treatise on what it is to be human. He has shown how choices can collapse around a man like dominos and carry him down a road he never thought to travel. I love the way he looks at the human heart and sees what is good and kind and valiant; and what is cruel and evil and cowardly. I found so many of these characters so believably self-serving, so consummately unaware of any struggle that was not their own, so cruel in the demands they made in the guise of love, that I winced at the irony of Henry doing so much to spare their feelings and protect their futures.

There is also Greene’s tussle with religion. Scobie is a Catholic and he tortures himself over his beliefs and the surety that he will be punished forever if he fails to follow the religious dictates. Greene appears to think the Church might have it wrong, that what is in the heart might be what really matters, and therein lies whatever hope there might be for the Scobies of the world.
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I found this to be one of Graham Greene’s better books; I am presently reading a couple of his other books that I don’t fully appreciate, and which I will not be giving five stars.

The story takes place in West Africa during the Second World War.

Major Henry Scobie is a police officer and deputy commissioner, married to Louise. There are various other characters, including Wilson, Harris, Yusef and Ali, Scobie’s “boy”.

The white men have servants called “boys””, who have names, and also “small boys” who are just called that; we never learn their names.

Scobie does not really love Louise but he has a neurotic need to please her and keep her happy, in fact keep everyone happy. Louise seems to believe she loves her husband and perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn’t. After all, to quote Prince Charles, “What is love?” (And when he said that, we knew he didn’t love Diana.)

I found the beginning of the book rather boring. But then Louise, who doesn’t feel accepted by the other wives, feels the need to go on holiday and does so.

I had difficulty in finding out where she goes to until later in the story it is revealed that it is South Africa.

To send Louise on holiday, Scobie borrows money from Yusef, who later blackmails him.

I found there to be various obscurities in the book; the author doesn’t always state matters directly, so one has to guess, which is not my forte.

A number of persons arrive in an open boat; they have been travelling for forty days. Some die, including two children.

I never found out where these people in the open boat came from; there may have been an incident involving a submarine.

There is also a 19 year-old widow, Helen, who is carried in on a stretcher grasping a stamp album, with her eyes shut.

Helen recovers and, with Louise out of the way, Scobie seemingly falls in love with Helen and immediately starts an affair with her.

It is from this point that the book gets interesting.

Scobie is in love with Helen, who is half his age, but feels he loves Louise too.

Louise returns and is aware of her husband’s relationship with Helen. Wilson and Louise are both fond of poetry and communicate well with each other and Wilson falls in love with Louise.

Scobie is a Catholic like many of the characters in Greene’s books and he has a crisis of conscience owing to his adultery.

Not being a Catholic myself, there is much I don’t understand about Scobie’s moral/ethical/religious problems.

He seems to feel that it is a sin for him to go to Mass or Communion, and I don’t really know the difference between these. It is as if Greene assumes that everyone understands all about Catholicism so he fails to explain adequately the reason for his problems and feelings of sinfulness, He feels damned.

Scobie feels he loves both Louise and Helen, but it is doubtful whether he really does, and who knows? He knows his adultery is a sin but can’t give up Helen because that would hurt her, and he can’t abandon Louise for the same reason.

The book turned out to be very readable, and Scobie’s character plausible and well-rounded. ( )

Amazing book. Character study. West Africa (Sierra Leone?) 1940's, policeman Scobie is middlingly married. He converted to Catholicism at marriage and is knee deep in it, though conflicted. Wife demands to leave / go to S. Africa due to frustration with location/climate. Scobie has to borrow money almost illicitly from Yusef, the Syrian to send her. This begins a slide to the ill side. A woman/widow is washed up from a sunken ship and he begins affair with her because he is sorry for her. Wife returns and he is stymied. Can't leave either woman because he pities them both. What to do? What a great story and milieu. Bravo. ( )