Honesty and Genius

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


To be honest, I have spent twenty years avoiding Graham Greene. He is one of those 'big' literary names, talked about by devotees with such passion, that they trigger in me a certain reluctance to get involved. Also, prior to that twenty years of avoidance, I had had several runs at the opening page of 'Brighton Rock' only to find myself closing the book and wondering what the fuss was about.

Then someone who knows me very well (a big plus when it comes to reading recommendations, I find) suggested I have a go at 'The Heart of the Matter' and...................and well, words fail me, because it was a novel so stunningly good that I almost feel unequal to the task of explaining why.

For a start, there's the story: Overlapping triangles of people trying to love each other in the impossibly gruelling physical circumstances of West Africa during the Second World War. Not just Scobie, the main character, but all the minor ones, are portrayed with such compassion and depth that the reader feels for each of them in their various predicaments. No one is 'right' and no one is 'wrong'. They are just humans in difficult circumstances, doing their best to communicate and understand each other, and often getting it wrong. I can think of no other writer who tackles Love, in all its guises, so head-on, so fearlessly, not to mention every other emotion on the human spectrum: jealousy, guilt, shame, hatred, fear, remorse, to name but a few. It had me scrambling for biographical detail about Greene himself. I mean, how could one man get to know so much, let alone be able to articulate it with such warm yet razor-sharp insight? The answer turned out to be simple: Greene's life was messy, as all lives are. He sought a meaning, as many of us do, through religion and art.

But don't let the 'religion' tag put you off (as it had me). His writing may, famously, be about the struggle to be Catholic - (in this book Scobie is a man torn in two by his conscience and the conflicting pull of his all-too-human heart) - but the picture Greene is really painting is much broader than that. It is a picture that transcends the question of religious faith, becoming instead a thrilling, heart-breaking narrative quest to illuminate what it is to be human; what keeps us going, what redeems us from failure, what remains after we are gone.

The power of Greene's language is also astonishing. Sentence after sentence hits you between the eyeballs. A cummerbund lies on a hotel bed,'ruffled like an angry snake'; a police station has the 'odour of human meanness and injustice - the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement and ammonia, and lack of liberty'. As a reader I have to confess to a terrible habit of turning down the tip of any page that contains some thought or image that I find particularly striking. By the time I reached the end of 'The Heart of the Matter' I had turned down so many page-tips that it is now impossible to close the book properly! But that's fine. It is a book I am happy never to close properly. It is a book I want never to forget. A book to read again. And again. A book that will always remind me of the power of words when they emanate from honesty and genius.



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