Meselenin Özü

by Graham Greene, Mîna Urgan (Translator)

İkinci Dünya Savaşı sırasında Büyük Britanya sömürgesi Sierra Leone’de geçen Meselenin Özü, yayımlandığı 1948 yılından bugüne dek popülerliğinden hiçbir şey yitirmedi. Greene romanı savaş sırasında Britanya Gizli Servisi’nin bir üyesi olarak bu ülkedeki deneyimlerine dayandırır. Atmosferini savaş, casusluk, aşk, zina ve ihanetin oluşturduğu roman merhamet, ıstırap, din ve sorumluluk temalarıyla dikkat çeker. Ve iki temel ahlaki ikilemle: “Başkalarını mutlu etmek mümkün müdür?” ve “İntihar çözüm olabilir mi?” George Orwell romanı Greene’in “en iyi yapıtlarından biri” olarak nitelerken, Anthony Burgess yazarın “egzotik bir ortamın ruhunu tek bir kitapta özetleme” becerisini alkışlamıştı.

Meselenin Özü, Modern Library’nin 20. yüzyılda İngiliz dilinde yazılmış en iyi 100 roman listesinde kırkıncı sırada yer alırken, Time dergisinin 1923 sonrası yazılmış en iyi 100 İngilizce roman listesine de dahil edilmiştir.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Africa, Literature, Novels, British Literature, Literary Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beware the pity-party

This is a terribly British, terribly colonial novel, set in West Africa during WWII. You know what I mean by colonial, you can see it, right? Men with manly jobs, say, like a potential police commissioner, are called "Tickie" by their wives and have a "boy" who has worked for them for thirteen years.

You'll have to look past all that, in all likelihood. (I had to. Dear god, why "Tickie"??)

Once you get past the things that might annoy, or that may not have aged particularly well, congratulations, you are reading a gorgeous novel by the inimitable Graham Greene. A man who was tortured by his Catholic beliefs (so he inflicted them on his characters, poor things). A man who had deep compassion for those stuck in the crevasses between belief and LIFE with all its not-quite-measuring-ups and messiness.

Henry Scobie (sorry, but I refuse to call him "Tickie") is one of Greene's suffering Catholics - by which I mean he really believes, and thus is basically tortured by his need to be 'good'. He's also got this overpowering sense of pity for others - for his wife, who isn't happy, for his mistress, who wants more from him, for even God Himself, who is getting a raw deal from Scobie, this flawed, imperfect human. Greene shows brilliantly how dangerous and self-destructive, how misplaced pity can be, how doomed one is if one lives by it.

He also shows the complexity of life juxtaposed with the flatness of "rules". He does this by featuring a man who is corrupted, unfaithful, untrusting and compromised, but who is also the most moral, caring and God-fearing person in any given room. Willing to give it all up, like a tortured saint for an undeserving rabble, old Tickie will break your heart. He did mine.

Damn perfection. Damn those confining "rules".

"The Church says..."
"I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERSO LA FINE C’È IL PRINCIPIO


L’omonima versione cinematografica è del 1953, cinque anni dopo l’uscita del romanzo, diretta da George More O’Ferrall, con Trevor Howard nel ruolo del protagonista Scobie.

Ogni tanto bisogna sgranchirsi, fare due passi, fare un po’ di moto, e respirare una boccata d’aria fresca…
Così come ogni tanto bisogna leggere Graham Greene.

O, come nel mio caso, rileggere, visto che Greene l’ho sempre frequentato molto. In entrambe le lingue.


Il film partecipò al Festival di Cannes. Parte degli esterni furono effettivamente girati in Sierra Leone, proprio dove è ambientato il romanzo di Greene, che conosceva bene quel paese.

Nel secolo di Joyce, un grande narratore che mette sempre al centro dei suoi romanzi una storia da raccontare, rivestita nel genere giallo, thriller, suspense, spy-story, a me fa gola.
[Come mi fa gola Joyce, nessun giudizio di merito]

Greene, e il narratore nei romanzi di Greene, non giudica. Mai.
E, scende sempre all’altezza dei suoi personaggi.
In questo brano, narratore e protagonista arrivano a confondersi:
Che stoltezza aspettarsi la felicità in un mondo così pieno di miserie! Aveva ridotto al minimo i suoi bisogni, nascosto le fotografie nei cassetti, cercato di cancellare i morti dalla memoria…. ma rimangono pur sempre gli occhi per vedere, le orecchie per udire. Che mi si mostri un uomo felice, e io vi mostrerò il suo egoismo, o la sua cattiveria, o perlomeno la sua ignoranza assoluta.


Invece di una classica colonna sonora musicale, si optò per musica tribale registrata durante le riprese.

The Heart of the Matter, il nocciolo della questione è da molti considerato il miglior romanzo di Greene: sembra contendersi la palma con Il potere e la gloria.
Personalmente però, credo che la darei a I commedianti.

Se uno sapesse le cose fino in fondo, dovrebbe sentir pietà anche per le stelle? Se uno raggiungesse quello che chiamano il nocciolo della questione.

E, nonostante il fastidio che sempre mi generano le questioni di fede religiosa, specie se cattolica - perché il pensiero corre subito al vaticano, e a quel referendum per rispedirlo ad Avignone che non si è mai fatto, e a tutti gli ipocriti bigotti altezza senso di colpa e family day - nonostante questo, io amo i romanzi di Greene, li godo proprio.
E amo anche questo che fa parte del ciclo cattolico.
E, di cattolicesimo è intriso, come quei cuori grondanti sangue in certe statue del cristo.


Oltre il protagonista interpretato da Trevor Howard, nel cast c’erano Elizabeth Allan, Maria Schell, Denholm Elliott, Peter Finch.

Così come è intriso di senso di colpa fino alla costa e alla cucitura, perché le cose che fanno davvero male sono quelle che è così terribilmente facile superare, perché gli esseri umani sono condannati alle conseguenze.

È ambientato in un posto che Greene non mette voglia di visitare, pur trasmettendone sia il fascino esotico che ferale:
Perché mai amo tanto questo posto? È forse perché qui la natura umana non ha ancora avuto tempo di mascherarsi? Qui nessuno avrebbe mai potuto parlare di un paradiso in terra: il cielo rimaneva rigidamente al proprio posto al di là della morte, e al di qua prosperavano le ingiustizie, le crudeltà, le grettezze che altrove la gente riusciva abilmente a mascherare. Qui si potevano amare le creature umane quasi come le ama Dio stesso, conoscendo il peggio di loro.



In un clima che limita gesti e parole, Dio può aspettare, perché:
come si può amare Dio a spese di una delle sue creature?

In mezzo a uomini e donne qualsiasi (mediocri) nel modo più assoluto, riuscire a mostrare Scobie come eroe, pur nella sua ordinarietà e banalità, richiede un’arte che Greene possiede pienamente.
Non è forse un eroe chi sa comprendere e perdonare gli altri ma non se stesso? Chi non si reputa più importante della sofferenza inflitta alle persone che ha intorno?
Il suicidio di Scobie, protagonista che all’inizio vediamo attraverso gli occhi di un altro personaggio, Wilson, come si farebbe in un film (e quanta frequentazione cinematografica dell’opera di Greene!), è gesto catartico e insieme atto di generosità, di giustizia, di amore (compassione) verso l’umanità.



Eppure, Greene sembra incurante del plot: in fondo si capisce dal principio chi è Wilson, il mistero sembra avere le gambe corte come le bugie [che invece le hanno lunghissime].
È Scobie che riempie la scena, che ci interessa seguire, di cui vogliamo sapere: Scobie ancora un novizio nel mondo dell’inganno, un uomo buono onesto integro nella sua ordinarietà.
Circondato da figure che sono veri personaggi e che Greene descrive con tocchi concisi ed esperti aggiungendo elementi alla trama, arricchendo lo scenario: serve davvero poco a Greene per calarci dentro, to put us in the picture.


Il nocciolo della questione diventò nella traduzione nostrana “L’incubo dei Mau Mau”.

E condurci in una costante caduta: dallo stato di grazia, caduta nell’amore, caduta nella disperazione, caduta in una terra di menzogne dalla quale non c’è ritorno:
Ma pare che, alla fin fine, non ci debba mai essere risparmiato niente. Per essere veramente umano, tu devi bere il tuo calice fino in fondo. Se una volta sei fortunato, o un’altra volta codardo, il calice ti viene presentato una terza.

Nonostante ciò, Scobie conserva tutta la sua umanità, e brilla in una luce che dura nel tempo:
Non gli era mai venuto in mente che la sua vita avesse una vera importanza. Non beveva, non fornicava, non mentiva, ma non aveva mai reputato virtù l’assenza di questi peccati dalla sua vita.

[Henry Avila · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read a book from a distinguished writer or otherwise for the first time I notice things particular to the author's style or mood. Has he an agenda, does he want to preach or just entertain. How well can he or she communicate with the reading audience, does the author care that much. Will people come back for a second helping maybe not, however a book that is boring to some will excite others. This is a way of stating people are different nobody pleases all, which makes for variety in the world, it would be dull if this was incorrect. Mr. Graham Greene starts and ends his story in West Africa during the Second World War to be precise 1943 in an unnamed country which looks like Sierra Leone, Mr. Henry Scobie the assistant commissioner of police in the largest city Freetown (unstated in the novel), a small town then but with over a million today. For 15 years there a honest man with a loving wife but now just been rejected for the top man when the commissioner is set to retire. Louise his wife is more disappointed than Scobie, discontented having no real friends, she wants and needs to get out on a long vacation to South Africa. As Louise leaves the husband becomes a very good friend of Helen a survivor of a ship torpedoed off the treacherous coast by a U- boat. Thirty years younger than the policeman nevertheless she is a lonely woman losing her husband in the tragedy, quickly succumbs to his charms. Secretly of course as people like to gossip not good for Mr. Scobie's career, you will not be surprised by the...
uneasy conscience the two women he loves, cause him many problems and sleepless nights. He had to borrow money to pay for his wife's voyage. And the only one there that has cash is the corrupt Syrian Yusef, who needs cooperation from Henry to smuggle diamonds on a Portuguese ship, they being neutral can safely cross the seas. Little by little the good man becomes less so, this makes for much soul searching that gives the title of book The Heart of the Matter. The rather gloomy situation seems impossible to solve as Louse is arriving back home and the Vichy French are on the border . The lawman feels too anxious and can't choose. The writer lived in Africa for years and his apparent knowledge of the land and natives gives the authenticity required to tell a convincing plot in a British colony. Yes I will read another of Greene's works.

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a classic "colonial novel." We are immediately immersed in the British colonial tropics - an unnamed British colony in West Africa during World War II. Cockroaches, rats and diseases abound. The British colony shares a border with a Vichy French (German-allied) colonial country so there is much intrigue about industrial diamond smuggling and the sinking of ships off the coast. This capital city is a melting pot with Africans and British of course (and the n-word is frequently tossed around by the latter over gin), Germans, and Syrian merchants, some of whom are Muslim and some Catholic.

Our protagonist is the chief of police. A man devoted to duty, he manages to create a totally loveless, duty-bound relationship with both his wife and mistress. He grows to dread spending time with either one. We watch his gradual and painful descent from stellar civil servant into evil.

The Heart of the Matter is a very "Catholic" novel. Unlike Brideshead Revisited, also considered a Catholic novel, the discussions of Catholicism aren't incidental to the plot and characters, but very much in the fore. There are discussions of points of Catholic theology with priests, the protagonist's wife and mistress, and religious discussions at cocktail parties as well as the debates that go on in the police chief's mind. But these aren't prolonged discussions; the plot moves and it's quite a fascinating book, suspenseful to the (bitter) end.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors and I have read seven or eight of his novels. Below are links to my reviews of other novels of his:

The End of the Affair

The Quiet American (set in Vietnam)

The Third Man

Brighton Rock

The Power and the Glory (set in Mexico)

The Comedians (set in Haiti)

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very strong, Very Greene. The comic touch always lurks on the edge of his major works - even here, a West African coastal colony town during World War 2, where British officers have regressed into a sort of juvenile madness. The novel is stifling, claustrophobic, and yet lightly rendered, as a police officer named Scobie moves along the fixed track of plot toward inevitable disaster.

Though (as the James Wood introduction, which is a horror of spoilers, discusses) Scobie is in some ways a confoundingly flat character, I enjoyed the way the novel mashed his unfeeling Catholicism against his pity for others, pity that drives him into sin. Greene is one of our most cinematic authors, and we can see these creations all too well: Scobie's bookish wife, Louise, the ridiculous Englishmen Wilson (a sublime foil) and Harris, the pathetic shipwrecked Helen, Yusef, a wonderfully crooked businesssman w/ a weak spot for Scobie (his pillows wet with tears for affection for the lead - what a villain!).

Though the book's racial politics are antiquated, Greene captures the grossness of the colonial ethos wonderfully and he goes deep into questions of redemption for Catholics. The text behaves oddly, with thoughts slipping onto the page and fracturing Greene's prose. Moments: Scobie inventing a story for a shipwrecked youth; Scobie's inability to get mad at Wilson; a late-night cockroach hunt.

"In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love."

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember a striking image from a previous novel of Graham Greene, of vultures settling to roost on the iron rooftops of a nowhere town in a third world country (it's the introduction to "The Power and the Glory"). When I came across an identical image in the first pages of the present novel, I knew I was letting myself in for another traumatic ride through the maze of a fallible human mind, I knew I would struggle with depression and moral ambivalence and with a loss of faith, yet I was also aware that the novel will hold me in its thrall until the last page, like compulsively watching the grief and destruction left behind by a trainwreck or by a suicide bombing.

He felt almost intolerably lonely. On either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted.

A mirror image reinforces the tonality of the novel in its final pages:

They didn't kiss; it was too soon for that but they sat in the hollow room, holding hands, listening to the vultures clambering on the iron roof.

Between these macabre bookends, a man named Scobie will be torn apart in his love, in his integrity and in his Catholic faith, in a sweltering tropical town on the coast of Sierra Leone, during the larger world tempest that was the second world war. The setting, the historical period and the damned protagonist made me toy with the idea of drawing parallels between Major Scobie and Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece "Under the Volcano". Both writers taped their inner demons in order to create their memorable expatriates, both explore the theme of self-destruction in the face of personal failure, yet Scobie and Firmin have almost nothing in common when it gets down to the root cause of their misfortune.

If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

My heart went out for the Consul, a victim of an excess of love and of misguided faith in his peers, a man who would rather drink himself to death than live in a world without love. Scobie's tribulations rang hollow when his inner good intentions didn't translate in commendable actions. There is something rotten in his rationing chain, something that will drive him deeper and deeper into a spider's web of lies, deceit and betrayals culminating in the assassination of his trusted coloured personal servant . The author gives us the key to Scobie in his introduction, by drawing the reader's attention to the difference between pity and true compasion, between a true forgiving and selfless Christian and one who is driven by a need to feel superior or by a twisted fascination with ugliness and misfortune. For example, Scobie may claim to be forgiving, but he secretly despises the man who once did him wrong:

Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man - it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser.

I love failure: I can't love success. confesses at one point Major Scobie in self-justification, putting the lie to the earlier image he painted for the reader as a caring and devoted husband:

Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face. [...] The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide - the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.

The issue is made even clearer when Scobie sets his eyes on a young war widow rescued from a torpedoed ship in the Atlantic: Scobie is in love with his feelings of power, not with the actual person.

He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never cath the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love': the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.

I did feel a sort of sympathy and understanding for Scobie in the beginning of the novel, proof of the indisputable talent of Greene to capture the inner landscape of a weak man struggling to overcome his sins. I even gave him some leeway for circumstances beyond his control, like the devastating loss of his only daughter at a very young age. But, like the lapsed priest from "The Power and the Glory", Scobie goes and sins again and again instead of asking for redemption and of mending his ways. He may be honest in his prayers and in his dreams, but he is definitely a sinner in his actions. As Helen exclaims in despair of Scobie's inability to chose between his wife and his mistress:

If there's one thing I hate is your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It's so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn't be here.

Graham Greene deserves all the praise and the glory for writing these ambiguous, soul searching novels centered on morally corrupt and frankly despicable characters that somehow still capture the reader's imagination and illustrate a universal need for redemption and forgiveness. Scobie, in my opinion, dug his own grave and had an immense capacity for lying to himself ("I didn't know myself that's all."), yet for most of the novel I believed his struggle was honest and well intended. I am reminded of the parable of the stone and should be in a more forgiving mood towards Scobie when looking back at my own past mistakes and at the hurt I had caused to the people I loved thankfully, it didn't get anywhere near murder , so my conclusion and the genius of Greene is to make us aware of the Scobie inside each of us.

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painfull affection, loyalty, pity ...

Scobie believes we are unable to truly know another person, and maybe this is one of the reasons he will fail - he is locked inside his own mind. But, like I mentioned before, he doesn't live in a perfect world, and his depression has roots that are part inherent human nature and part the crazy times and wild places he finds himself thrown in.

What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery.

Looking beyond the personal drama of Scobie, I feel the need to remark that Graham Greene's prose is outstanding out also in regards to capturing the sense of place and the elusive, ambivalent nature of love - a balancing act between clear eyed, lucid intellectual attraction and atavistic, subconscious lust. Greene put his actual experience of living (and spying) in Sierra Leone during the war to good use in the novel. The tensions with the French collaborationist neighbors, with German interests in the region and with neutral Portuguese smuggling of diamonds are convincing, as are the snatches of dialogue and the whole tropical lethargy of the expatriates:

This is the original Tower of Babel. West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.

Part of Greene secret of success is for me his empathy for the local population, his fascination with the less sophisticated societies that may be living closer to nature and are more honest in their likes and dislikes.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pie-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worse: you din't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

Some of the phrases and gestures strike me as extremely close to my own recent experiences of living as an expat in one of these countries. Others are embarassing reminders of the ugly undercurrent of racism and imperial arrogance that brought down the English Empire and that I still catch echoes of from some of my colleagues today:

"Been here long?"
"Eighteen bloody months."
"Going home soon?"

I already knew (from "The End of the Affair") that Greene is incredibly poignant and quotable when he describes human passion, and I was not disappointed here:

What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.

Passion though tends to be insufficient to carry the heavy baggage of Scobie's past mistakes, defeats and hesitations:

Although they could touch each other it was as if the whole coastline of a continent was already between them; their words were like the stilted sentences of a bad letter writer.

In the end, Scobie must face his demons alone, neither women nor church nor career being proper substitutes for the huge empty spaces inside Scobie's soul:

I don't want to keep you, Father. There are other people waiting. I know these are just fancies. But I feel - empty. Empty.
***
It sometimes seemed to him that all he could share with them was his despair.

I wish I could explore more the religious implications and parables of Scobie's tragedy (I see Yousef the Syrian as an incarnation of the Devil offering the world, and Scobie as the sinner who surrenders in much too easily to temptation). That's what re-reads are for, and I believe I will feel the pull of Greene's prose and of his tormented characters soon enough. The author makes his argument crystal clear in one the last one liners to be picked in the text: the fact that each man is unique and should be judged on his or her own merits, to the particulars of his or her case, and not by any standard, cold and inflexible ancient code of ethics:

The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart.

***

final note: the current novel also includes in a moment of epihany for Scobie a rendition of one of my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, although the translation in my edition is a rather poor one. I will close my review instead with the original:

Herbst

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere
Erde, aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.
Wir allen fallen.

Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
Und doch ist einer, welcher dieses

Fallen, undendlich sanft
in seinen Händen hält.

[Laysee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Heart of the Matter is a sobering revelation of how impossible it is to navigate life consistently as an honorable and good human being. This, to me, is the testimony of its main protagonist, Henry Scobie.

Fifty-year-old Major Henry Scobie is a highly respected deputy commissioner of police who oversees border security at a British colonial outpost in West Africa during World War II. He has a solid reputation for upholding justice and is deemed incorruptible. Scobie loves his life at the colony even though he is unhappily married to Louise who thrives on being well liked and admired by white folks deemed her social equal. When Scobie is passed over for promotion as commissioner of police, Louise is embarrassed. She is inconsolable until Scobie is able to finance her passage to S. Africa. Scobie’s lack of money precipitates shady dealings with Yusef, a Syrian black marketeer. This uncharacteristic indiscretion compromises his values and jeopardizes his faith as a devout Catholic.

Scobie feels a deep sense of responsibility toward Louise and cannot be happy unless she is happy. He reflects, “If I could arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for a while what experience had taught him - that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.” And yet, Scobie feels duty bound against all odds to secure Louise’s happiness. Later, this obligatory loyalty becomes an even greater burden when Scobie falls in love with Helen Roft, a young widow. With profound sympathy, sensitivity, and compassion, Greene exposes his readers to Scobie’s moral dilemmas, emotional and spiritual struggles when Scobie confronts his failings – corruption, infidelity, betrayal.

Scobie wears me out. He has a good heart and wants to do what is right. In an episode where he breaks the rules to save the job of a Portuguese sea captain who pleads with him for mercy and appeals to their mutual Catholic faith, Scobie realizes to his dismay that while others had been corrupted by money, ’he had been corrupted by sentiment.’ Scobie is always bothered by others’ point of view. ’Inexorably another’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.’ What makes this book upsetting is that for all his good intentions, Scobie gets it all wrong, pleases no one, and ends up paying too high a price for trying to fulfil the impossible ambition of living for others. He exasperates me but I feel for him, too.

As always in a book by Graham Greene, there are astute observations on the human condition and nuggets of wisdom and insight. Scobie’s attempt at rationalization in the quote below is worth thinking about:

‘The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths.’
This is the conviction, I believe, Scobie lives by. Sadly, it seems grossly inadequate judging from the outcome of Scobie’s life.

The Heart of the Matter holds up questions for which there are no easy answers:
Is happiness attainable? And by whom?

Can God forgive a person who does what is wrong when he means to do what is right for the sake of those he loves?

’Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is the sin the corrupt or evil man never practised. 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.’

Scobie is that man of goodwill. He deserves better.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hace poco leí “Una muerte en la familia”, de Jame Agee, un magnífico libro en el que, entre otras cosas, se pone en cuestión la eficacia de la religión como consuelo frente al dolor por la muerte de un ser querido, e incluso se sugería que en tales situaciones la religión podría ser más un problema que una solución. Como bien dice Fernando Savater, las religiones son como el vino: hay a quién le sienta bien y hay a quién no. Este es un libro sobre alguien al que la religión no le hace ningún bien y, aunque es lo último que desearía, se convierte en el causante del sufrimiento de otros. Al igual que en el libro de Agee, parece que “El revés de la trama” es un reflejo del conflicto interior que, similar al de su protagonista, vivió Graham Green.   
 
Este relato sobre el camino de perdición que irremediablemente recorre el subcomisario de policía Scobie, un hombre íntegro y católico ferviente, lo sitúa el autor en una colonia olvidada del Imperio británico por la única razón –pienso yo, los nativos son únicamente parte del paisaje- de entrelazar la morosidad de su prosa y la desesperación del protagonista con el clima del lugar: un calor agobiante y disuasorio de cualquier movimiento innecesario (“Nada se perdía aplazando las cosas. Tenía la tenue idea de que si uno las aplazaba el tiempo necesario, quizá la muerte acabase por arrebatárselas totalmente de las manos”) en el que compiten el constante zumbido de los mosquitos con el repiqueteo insufrible y eterno de la lluvia, un clima, en fin, “para la ruindad, la malevolencia, el esnobismo, pero que algo como el amor o el odio hace perder la cabeza a un hombre.” Un ambiente dominado por las molestias, las intrigas y la mezcolanza de razas y procedencias que imponen una guerra lejana pero siempre presente y que me más de una vez me ha traído a la mente esa gran película titulada “Casablanca”.
 
Pero que nadie se confunda, la novela no está al nivel de la película de Curtiz, ni Scobie tiene el poder seductor de Rick, ni ninguna de las dos mujeres que completan el triángulo amoroso del relato de Green tienen el encanto de Ilsa, ni el conflicto interior del protagonista grahamiano es tan atractivo como el del cínico y amargado Rick. Nada hay de cinismo en las agrias reflexiones de Scobie, ese pobre hombre, enamorado del fracaso -“Sé un fracaso para que pueda quererte de nuevo”-, angustiado por la felicidad de los otros, de la que se siente totalmente responsable –“Toda víctima exige devoción”-, y atormentado por su catolicismo que le proporciona todas las respuestas pero que es incapaz de explicar el porqué de las preguntas y el propósito de Dios al enfrentarle a ellas o al permitir que el diablo en forma de comerciante sirio le tiente con su meloso arrobamiento hasta hacerlo caer en su perdición – “La desesperación es el precio que uno paga por imponerse una meta imposible”-. Un conflicto que, aun narrado con la habilidad literaria de Green, llega a hacerse repetitivo y un tanto incoherente. 

[Dave Marsland · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an 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"

God I love Graham Greene. It’s no great secret that most of the books I read are by American authors, so on the occasions that I need a bit of Englishness, I seek sanctuary in Graham Greene. It’s terribly English, all pink gins and polite/banal conversation. And The Heart of the Matter is terribly Catholic too. I was raised in a very strict Catholic household (my parents, like Graham Greene, were Catholic converts) and no matter how much you lapse you can never shake off the feeling of guilt or the fear of eternal damnation. That is the heart of the matter. Graham Greene doesn’t have the fire and brimstone of Flannery O’Connor, he’s more about despair and contrition.

Based in a West African colony during WW2, Major Henry Scobie is a senior policeman who prides himself on being incorruptible. His Catholic faith and honesty help him navigate a loveless marriage.
“The trouble is, he thought , we know answers – we Catholics are damned by our knowledge”
The symbolism throughout this claustrophobic novel is wonderful: broken Rosary beads, vultures, rusty handcuffs, sweat and storms. Things get interesting when Scobie commits a mortal sin by breaking one of the 10 commandments, and both his moral judgement and his life go into free fall.
“There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes: the dead figure on the cross, the plaster Virgin, the hideous stations that representing a series of events that happened a long time ago. It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair”
It’s a colossal piece of writing. The final 50 pages rank amongst the best I've ever read. Graham Greene's attempt to understand religious despair and theological fatalism are just astonishing .

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Circle Reads 35

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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, eg The Power and the Glory) 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 more-or-less 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.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE FIRST FACETIOUS REVIEW BASED MAINLY ON FRANKIE VALLI AND SUPREMES SINGLES

*** Spoilers ahoy but we're all friends aren't we?****

As our tale opens, Major Henry Scobie is stuck in a you never close your eyes anymore when you kiss my lips type situation with Mrs Major Henry Scobie aka Louise and there’s a big thought bubble coming out of both their heads which says Where did our love go? Well, after 15 years, what do you expect darlin? Then this new character strolls in called Wilson and he clocks Louise and he’s all there she was just a walkin down the African colony singin doo wah diddy diddy she looked good she looked fine and I nearly lost my mind and before you can say another pink gin dahling? he’s telling her Mrs Major Scobie, my world is empty without you and she’s now then Wilson, you cahn’t hurry lohve, no, you just got to wait. Dahling.
So she decides she wants to visit South Africa, as you do in the middle of World War Two, because it’s automatically sunshine there. So then the Major’s like what? No! Love is here and now you’re gone what a bitch but then this shipwreck happened, not a metaphor a real one, and the young Keira Knightley (I think we could get Keira - couldn't we?) winds up widowed and prostrate in front of him and it’s oh what a night late September in 42, what a laydee, what a night and he’s a bit Dawn Go Away I’m No Good For You but she props herself up on her one good elbow and says stay...just a little bit alongerrrr, another pink gin Major? And as soon as she’s vertical again love is like an itching in her heart tearin it apart and she gets Major Henry to scratch it which he does with aplomb.
And the pink gin rains down for forty days and forty nights. But even though tourism must have been discouraged during a period of total war, Louise aka Mrs Major Henry Scobie sails back from South Africa and she’s all let’s hang on to what we’ve got and his mind gets all messed up, every day he’s falling in and out of love with the one or the other, but because of the big religious thing he has going on (I should have mentioned that) he’s living in shame. He’s careful but he’s waiting for that moment when Mrs Major Louise will tell him as he dons his solar topee and heads off towards the nissen huts baby baby I’m aware of where you go each time you leave my door - I watch you walk down the African colony knowing your other love you’ll meet and so forth. He knows it’s in the post, then there’s Keira feeling like a rag doll telling him one minute go on, get outta my life you don’t really love me you just keep me hanging on then the next minute ooooh dob me one Major I hear a symphony coming out of your fleshly parts you knows I do . Poor guy doesn’t know if he’s on his elbow or his arse and the religion appears to be no help. Anyway he decides to walk like a man for a change and take drastic action. I shan’t give the ending away but I will say this much – it turns out that big girls don’t cry much. If at all.

*******


I got to feeling a bit guilty about the above review, thinking well, maybe Graham Greene deserves to be taken just a little more seriously, because, God knows, his books are serious stuff. So I must say that this novel is pretty good stuff and even quite compelling, but I had a crucial problem with it. The central crisis, the horrible dilemma he contrives for his man Scobie to find himself in, is religious. I can’t discuss it without giving the whole show away, so **big fat spoiler warning in dazzly orange lights** . Scobie believes to the core of his very self that if he takes Communion without having confessed his sins and received absolution and – crucially – without a genuine desire not to commit the said sin again – then he will be damned to hell for eternity. Ironical twists abound, as you may well expect – the woman he’s committing his adulterous sins with and with whom he fully intends to continue, because he loves her, is a non-believer and thinks his convictions are quaint. He doesn’t love her less for that - in his eyes God hasn’t, for inscrutable reasons, given her the grace to see the truth. So, he’s driven to go to Mass with his wife to avoid her being suspicious. And go he does, and gets his soul damned to hell as far as he's concerned. For all eternity! He says : “What I’ve done is far worse than murder- that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot : it’s over and it’s done., but I’m carrying my corruption around with me.” I mean, really? Is GG seriously saying that going to Mass and taking communion if you’re still intending to carry on sleeping with your mistress is far worse than murder? Really? That’s crazy you know. So if I can't take that very serious point in this serious book seriously, then maybe I the Non-Believer have to turn away muttering "It's Chinatown, Jack, leave it" like a gumshoe too far over his head in other people's business.
Of course it turns out his wife pretty much knew all about the affair so this abandoned act was really not needed. So there was the irony. There was I say plenty of that sloshing around.
However, I could read it as a novel which was an intensely observed case of mental illness and gross self-delusion. Scobie is about as wrong as a person could be about the situation he finds himself in, so maybe GG is implying that he’s wrong about God too, that the ugly version of God Scobie appears to believe in which God is half cruel puppetmaster and half lascivious voyeur of human pleasures and sins and repentances, a very repulsive version, is as wrong as his presumptions that both his wife and his mistress actually care about him. The speed with which they drape replacement male companions about their persons after Scobie’s demise appears to give the lie to that one.
This novel hangs in the air like cordite after you’ve finished it with its awful pathetic denouement. So, it's pretty good.

A GENERAL COMPLAINT ABOUT A THING NOVELISTS DO

While I was reading it something bugged me which is a general point about novels. Authors like to drop nuggets of wisdom into their prose and sometimes I think they should be told to stop because their nuggets aren’t actually wise at all. Examples from this book – these are from the narrative, not from dialogue, so they’re as it were spoken by GG himself –

“Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness” (p87) [who says it is? I don’t - do you?:]

“He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life , the interest the young mistake for love.” (p126) [oh yeah, do the young mistake it like you say? or would they think this intense interest in a stranger’s life was merely really creepy?:]

“Every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion” (p242) [no it doesn’t:]

“We are all of us resigned to death : it’s life we aren’t resigned to.” (p242 – two on one page!) [and, er – no, I’m NOT resigned to death AT ALL, where did he get that idea from?:]

Possibly this nugget-dropping is an old-fashioned… fashion… which modern writers don’t do. I haven’t made a scientific survey. But if they haven’t stopped nuggeting, they should because it’s not big and it’s seldom clever.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars, because of the quality of the writing. But I am going to disagree with the label that goes with it, that of "really liked it." Because I did not. I feel no affection for this book, and I doubt that I will ever re-read it for many reasons that I will state below. But for those just reading this to get a quick glance about whether they should read it or not: you should, in short. It is worth it. I just would not expect to fall in love.

The book focuses on Major Scobie, a policeman in a British colony of West Africa, where Greene himself spent some time. It's set during WWII, which serves to set up the mood of distrust, fragility and vague apprehension that is to haunt the novel and our hero. Major Scobie is a Catholic, and he is married to a shallow, mild horror of a woman named Louise. Insert her unhappiness, his distance, another woman, another man, and you have your novel right there. Those are the basics. Okay, now I can move forward with this.

The book is essentially a character study of Major Scobie. And in that function, it is incredibly thorough, and makes sure to search into every area of his soul, several times over. We really do see the man laid naked in front of us. Which is appropriate, given that he's meant to be Christ figure (and casts himself in that role several times.). Even one of the priests says that "when people have a problem they go to you, not to me," and bemoans the fact that priests are not as useful as policemen. It's an interesting thought, but in any case. To me, he was an embodiment of abstract Catholic virtues, set out in one man, going about life as the Catholic Church would have you do. This made real sense to me for the first part of the novel, where Scobie is deconstructed very well, and Greene's conceit was quite effective, I thought. He shows us the difference between living your life as a man and living your life as an abstract virtue. Scobie stays untouched by the animal side of humans, the love, the anger, all vice ridden emotions found in the world that are not learned, but come from within. We do not see him exhibit any of these emotions. And honestly, you sort of dislike him for it. He is inhuman, which drives his wife and everyone who knows him crazy, and honestly, it drove me a little crazy too. But. I appreciated it as a message about living in the world rather than living apart from it, untouched by it. Scobie's major motivation is pity and compassion, which is exactly what Catholicism would tell you to do. But it seems so distant, so resigned, that its rather awful. You end in pitying Scobie as much as you do the clearly inferior characters around him. Or at least, I did. Graham Greene peppers this study with a great many insightful observations about death and the attachment that we really have for people, and what love really is.

**spoiler alert***

Which builds into the second half of the novel, which annoyed the flying fuck out of me, confused me and I'm really not sure if I agree with the premise of it at all. Essentially, Greene has Scobie become involved in an affair with a shipwrecked widow named Helen, who has absolutely no one. It's an incredibly sordid affair like one would expect to see in a soap opera, and Scobie is meant to seem all wrong for the role. He has Scobie motivated by pity for her, has him express that it is the weak, the ugly who demand his allegiance, not the beautiful and the intelligent. So this is what makes him succumb to Helen. And then on top of that, he says that he stays with her out of pity. That it was love in the beginning (which I don't believe, as they never show it at all, but skip forward to the part where he is lamenting how love is over) and then it is about duty and responsibility and keeping her happy because if he left, then she would be in pain, and he doesn't want to cause anybody pain. And then his wife comes back, and everyone tells her about the affair, and then she's in pain. And he can't leave either of them because they need him more than God does. That's a direct quote from him. Which is how he squares it with his sinning conscience, carrying on with the whole thing. And then he kills himself because people who love you forget you the second you die, and then nobody will be in pain anymore, and so he's sacrificing himself for them. I just cannot agree with the whole premise and excuse that Scobie makes for his conduct there. I don't believe he ever knew what love was, I don't believe in his reasoning for why he would have succumbed to Helen in all noble motivations. As a Catholic and a girl who's done it before herself, I can certainly see why you would be attracted to someone out of pity. Why you would feel love for people who need you. Fine. But there were many other ways to help Helen other than screwing her, sir. I don't buy that such a distant guy would have "fallen in love" due to pity. I buy that he stays with his wife out of pity and responsibility. I don't buy the whole affair, so I can't believe in his moral dilemma. Helen is painted as such an awful whore character I cannot believe why he would have been there at all. (We'll get to that in a second.) Then he goes screaming to God over and over again. I get the penchant for drama. I'm Catholic. Yes, it was interesting to try to see a man live exactly as the Church would tell him, and still to be a human being. But I don't buy that it happened to Scobie. I just hate the whole sordid interlude. I know I'm supposed to hate that its so sordid. But I just think that he made Scobie a much less interesting character throughout it, and everyone else involved were mere representations of what he needed to progress along his moral dilemma, not real people.

But. Given that. The last few chapters where he methodically plans his suicide, tries to save everyone the pain around him, quietly goes about his business, and the meditation on what it is like to know that you are leaving the world… that was good. That was heartbreaking. It was that effective quiet whisper of endless pain that I just thought was incredibly skillful and well done.


Okay, I really need to talk about what really offended me in this book though: the terrible misogyny. The characters in this book are horrific. There is an extremely strong Madonna/whore complex that runs throughout it, and is represented by the cardboard cutouts that are Louise and Helen. These women are represented exactly as a man who knew nothing about women but what he read in books would represent them as. Grasping, shallow, bitter, angry, small, but with amazing flashes of insight that awe men!.. and yet they are so childish at the same time, so fragile!.. and then they are so stupid the next second. I hated all the women in this book, and I'm pretty sure Graham Greene did, too. I hated that Louise and Helen weren't women, weren't people, but were mere representations of his moral dilemmas, one dimensional harpies who enacted him scenes, had emotional fits, and generally made his life a living hell. Poor baby man who only wanted peace, but no no, these screeching women just insist upon ruining his life! Women are the root of all evil. If it weren't for them, Scobie would be a perfect Christ angel! No wonder Greene converted to Catholicism, if this was his opinion of women. The Church agrees wholeheartedly. Women must be madonnas who look after your home, to be worshipped, who look after your spiritual well being, and stick by their men when they are unfaithful- i.e: Louise. Or they are lost souls who are ready to fuck the first man who comes by when their hero does not support them- like Helen. They have no inner strength of their own except in those first meetings that drew our hero to them, before they became harpies, like all the rest of women are! The two girls were virtually indistinguishable in their manner sometimes. Maybe that's why I just couldn't get into Scobie's dilemma. The women involved made me want to barf, and his bad taste in them, and his opinions of them as people just revolted me just as much.

End opinion: Graham Greene's writing: good, elegant, with quiet insight. Graham Greene's misogyny: godawful.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” –Graham Greene

I was raised, as they say “in the church,” and even taught English in parochial (religious) schools for several years, as faith drained from me, inch by inch, year by year. I think of myself as an agnostic now, though I sometimes do pray, just in case, I say jokingly. Though I am not and never have been a Roman Catholic, I am quite familiar with the intricacies of Catholic theology. I was once a doubt-driven Christian. I loved reading the anguished novels of Coetzee, Camus, Dostoevsky and yes, Greene, especially the three central “Catholic” ones that some of have told me emerged out of his own life and moral struggles. Greene was once asked about what he thought was the fate of the three central male characters in The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory, and he said he thought Scobie of Heart of the Matter might be in Hell, Maurice in End of the Affair might be in Heaven, and the whiskey priest of Power and the Glory was in purgatory. All three books deal with infidelity, or adultery, which is something Greene himself, a lifelongRoman Catholic, had some painful experience with.

Scobie is a British intelligence officer in a colony in British West Africa during World War II. He is married to Louise, and together they had a daughter, Catherine, who died many years ago. Both of the Scobies are observant Catholics. Louise, approaching fifty, doesn’t want to live there anymore, and so he borrows some money to send her away indefinitely. While she is gone Scobie, who has fallen out of love with Louise, and loves no one anymore, not even himself, meets a young refugee woman, Helen, who reminds him of his daughter. He knows she has suffered deeply; he pities her and wants to take responsibility for her, and out of his own anguish and what might just be love, he begins an affair with her.

When his wife returns abruptly. Scobie realizes he can leave neither woman, as he knows he will then cause them pain. He wants Louise to be happy, he wants Helen to be happy, and he mainly just wants peace and solitude. He finds in the process that he does love Louise, and Helen, and God. But when Louise encourages him to go to confession, and take communion with him, he realizes he can’t confess something he doesn’t regret, even if he knows it is mortal sin. That’s the heart of the story, what brings Scobie to greater depths of despair, an unforgivable sin in itself.

Some quotations that lay out Scobie’s dark psychological/spiritual state:

“It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?”

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”

Later, in his struggle with what to do about his dilemma, he talks to Father Rank, and confesses, without making a commitment to change, which is no confession at all, they both know. Later on, Father Rank says to Louise:

"I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."

Greene remained a Catholic until the end, but he never stopped wrestling with the church even as he engaged in what he admitted was sinful behavior, hurtful to his wife and family. Scobie, like Greene, is no saint. He’s a sinner, deeply flawed, struggling as most humans do in ways we come to sympathize with—if not admire-- him for.

The Heart of the Matter was ranked #40 in the list of greatest English-language novels of all time, and from my rereading of it, it’s a deservedly high rating. Greene himself didn’t like the book as much as his critics did, nor as much as his many followers. It’s heavy, even grimly agonizing in places, but it deals with issues of love and morality, betrayal and corruption brilliantly and moving. I actually think The Power and the Glory is even better, but in these books we know Greene is unflinchingly examining the human heart in all its complexities.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham Greene’s powerful story of morality, integrity, love, betrayal, intrigue, corruption, life changing events and Catholic guilt set in war time Sierra Leone.

This is a great book and only the second Graham Greene that I have read (Brighton Rock being the other). The Heart of the Matter is a powerful, thought provoking and deeply profound novel that works on many different levels. It has at its centre the story of a Scobie – a man of integrity and honesty, a deeply principled police officer and how a series of events changes everything…

I know that there was a film adaptation starring Trevor Howard which I would be interested to see – although fully expect that this may well be the usual sanitised Hollywood version / rewrite to which we have become all too accustomed to?

I would recommend this book to anyone and it makes me think that I really must read more Graham Greene – does anyone have any recommendations?

The Heart of the Matter is a must read and definitely not to be missed.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jan-Maat]

At one time in my life I read a lot of Grahame Greene, I don't know precisely when but it must have been in late autumn or winter because my memory of so many is dreary, rain on the window panes, dark, action played out in black and white. An alien mind with a curious if twisted consistency. A feeling of inevitable betrayal and fear of failure in The Confidential Agent. Relationships here or in The Quiet American as promising a particularly dreary doom. A decaying post war feeling that suggests a world of defeat in Brighton Rock rather than survival and new opportunity.

Perhaps if I read them again I'd be surprised at bright colours and flashes of optimism closed to the characters but open to the reader?

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham Greene's 1948 novel, The Heart of the Matter is nominally set in West Africa, perhaps because the author served Britain in Sierra Leone for several years during WWII. However, the heart of this novel is quite definitely situated in a far more authorial landscape known as "Greeneland".



Oddly enough, while Graham Greene seemed to savor his time on the African continent, there is little of Africa or Africans held within the novel, offerings a scant hint of life beyond the British administrative presence, the sounds of voices or the the images of the local people going about their daily lives. Instead, this is a tale, set during WWII that seeks to portray the soul of a man named Scobie, a terminally lethargic police official, estranged from his wife Louise, nearing retirement but thoroughly alienated from his job after 15 years of service in Africa for the colonial administration of Britain.

The scene is marked by great heat, constant flies, frequent roaches & perpetual rain. Meanwhile, the other characters seem sent forth from Greene's central casting bureau, among them: Yusef, a Syrian shop owner who is not trustworthy but has necessary connections to both money & the sources of local power; a priest named Fr. Rank, ("gray-haired & with the roguery of an old elephant") who seems to be present mainly as a foil for Scobie; an undercover agent named Harris who is in love with Scobie's wife & keen to discover Scobie's weaknesses; and a man named Wilson who seems out-of-place in Africa but who attended the same school as Harris, allowing him a minimal feeling of attachment.

All of these characters are bent on keeping up English habits while serving in a fairly inconsequential African posting. At one point, at the Bedford Hotel which both share, Harris tells Wilson, "You don't have to dress up for a Syrian, old man", this at a point when Wilson's cummerbund was said to "lay uncoiled like an angry snake." And later Harris adds, "Be careful of the fish old man!" (The "old man" usage is essential Greene dialogue, being frequently used in The Comedians & of course by Harry Lyme in The Third Man.)



What lifts this tale is the language the author employs, that which makes reading Graham Greene so uplifting even when the characters can at times seem flat & immobile. The law courts building is described as "a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men". And it continues:

Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate in so rhetorical a conception. But in any case the idea was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the change-room & the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness & injustice--it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia & lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily but you could never eliminate that smell. Prisoners & policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

The Heart of the Matter seeks to display what happens to those who can not love, who are defeated in their attempt to fully admit others into their lives & therefore ultimately can not accept themselves as worthy of life.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of man be carried out in fewer years? Couldn't we have committed our 1st major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a 15-year-old deathbed?

At one point & with reference to British WWII censorship rules, we are told that Scobie, "against the strictest orders was exercising his own imperfect judgment". In fact, throughout the novel, Scobie fails at life in a more generic manner & therefore can not merit redemption. Greene is often categorized as a "Catholic writer", which I think is at least somewhat dismissive, as more than a few of his novels are teleological rather than sectarian, more generally illustrating characters who are unable to love, to fulfill their human function by connecting to their fellow man.



Here are but a few more clues to Scobie's persona:

Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you. Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace. In the mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an 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 good will carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

The word "pity" was used as promiscuously as the word "love": the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.

It was as impossible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness & chaos than for Christ to have awoken in the tomb. Christ had not been murdered: you couldn't murder God: Christ had killed himself: he had hanged himself on the cross.

These may seem like the ravings of a mad man but in fact, they represent a kind of interior dialogue of a man in quest of his soul. In my view, Scobie is at least an informal believer in a godly presence but someone who can't confront his own weakness, or his inability to love. In order to cease infecting others with his sense of despair & failing to clarify his own "god-questions", Scobie suffers "the stigmata of loneliness". He declares that "I'm carrying my corruption around with me & am damned."



Apparently, Graham Greene suffered bouts of depression or bipolar disorder and perhaps we can see in Scobie why the author was called "the ultimate chronicler of 20th century man's consciousness & anxiety." The Heart of the Matter is quite definitely not every reader's cup of Tetley's but, perhaps akin to viewing an Ingmar Bergman film, it is nonetheless a rich & remarkable experience.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first novel that I've read by Graham Greene and it certainly won't be the last. It's a simple story about love, religion, adultery, greed, betrayal and is extremely well written. Fantastic characters, deeply flawed, in an extremely "British" novel

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know exactly why I love Graham Greene novels; and this, The Heart of the Matter, is a shining example of Greene at his best. It is vintage Greene, containing all his themes and strengths. No, it's not my favorite from him; but from I've read thus far, it is the best example of all he's capable of -- it is the novel I recommend you try if you want to find out if he's for you.

For one, this has the classic Greene love struggles: men and women caught up in that irresistible, uncontrollable force. Greene's depiction of love is not a glorified one; rather, it is an accurate one. He displays the struggles involved with it; he shows that it makes no fucking sense; that it is something that can be manipulated, and that it can easily slip through one's fingers. Love is the epicenter of his character's lives, at times giving them uplifting hopes of glorious heights; but mostly it tears them apart as they try to control, cope with, and intellectually understand something that can't be understood.

"At the word ‘books’ Wilson saw her mouth tighten just as a moment ago he had seen Scobie flinch at the name of Ticki, and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship -- pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness."

"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."

The characters that one grows to care about in a Greene novel -- those that are the centerpiece of his stories -- are always complex. They have a multitude of opposite natures in their head and heart stuggling, competing, pushing to break through. His "heros" and "villians" are never easy to decipher and are not reliable, and his likable characters are never perfect men and women -- rather, they are real and human.

These epic battles of the mind and heart are not only with love, but often with faith, as well. This provides a deeper element to the internal musings of his characters, and -- as providence (or lack thereof) is always a factor -- brings weight to their actions. Along with this, death is always a thought, always a possibility; always somewhere in the back of the mind. Life is always questioned, always taken seriously, in a Graham Greene novel.

Lastly, his novels are awesomely quotable. Often with a line or two he manages to sum up life’s most important issues, offering nuggets of wisdom that can make one gasp for air. My favorite from The Heart of the Matter :

"Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men."

Fuckin' gravy.

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets. A scar had been made on his memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined, the taste of gin at midday, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.”

“So much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

“Somewhere in the darkness two rats scuffled. The waterside rats were the size of rabbits. The natives called them pigs and ate them roasted. Their name helped to distinguish them from the wharf rats who were a human breed.”

“There were not many people at the club yet. He switched off his lights and waited for Louise to move, but she just sat there with a clenched fist. 'Well, dear, here we are’ he said in the hearty voice strangers took as a mark of stupidity. Louise said 'Do you think they all know by this time?' 'Know what?' ‘That you've been passed over.”

“Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.”

************

Wilson has just arrived at a colonial city on the west coast of Africa, resembling Freetown in Sierra Leone where Graham Greene worked for MI6 during WWII. From the hotel balcony he spies Scobie, who works for the British police. The town is a polyglot place of Africans, Indians, West Indians, Syrians, French and British. Scobie has lived inside the grimy port for fifteen years, working in a group of government buildings faintly reflecting the grandeur of empire. Nazi submarines patrol the harbor, a haze of heat oppresses the air. Scobie has been passed over to become police commissioner by a younger man.

Scobie lost his bungalow in the European quarter to a senior, now occupying a house in the flats, a swampy neighborhood where vultures search through piles of trash. His wife Louise joined him before the war and is unable to return to England. She is unhappy with their status, a Catholic who converted her husband, as Greene had been by his wife. Their young daughter died recently and although he is no longer in love he feels pity for her plight. Louise wants him to quit or retire so she won’t have to suffer the humiliation of his not being promoted, yet Scobie wants to stay on to avoid spending all his time with her.

The officer’s club is full of snobs but Louise hits it off with the newly arrived inspector Wilson, as they both are fans of poetry. Scobie encourages their friendship to distract Louise while he tries to secure her passage to South Africa. When a village policeman commits suicide he goes into the bush to investigate, where a local priest worries over the mortal sin. Greene had long held doubts about how a sinner could be cast out by a loving God. As Louise prepares to leave a sense of guilt shifts to her shoulders. Wilson has fallen in love with her but she resists his advances in spite of her having let him kiss her once.

Scobie had borrowed money from Yusef, a black marketeer, in order to pay for Louise’s fare. Wilson, who is angry and vindictive about her leaving, suspects bribery was involved. Scobie begins an affair with Helen, a woman shipwrecked in a naval attack, as Louise unexpectedly returns. Yusef, aware of the affair, begins to blackmail Scobie. Unwilling to break off the relationship he attempts to hide it from her. Without an absolution from the Church he receives communion with Louise. In a state of sin he contemplates suicide, perhaps the most deadly sin of all.

After reading three of Greene’s so-called “Catholic” novels, ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘The Power and the Glory’ and ‘The End of the Affair’, this was my least favorite, but not by much. ‘The Heart of the Matter’ is more concerned with Greene’s doubts about religious dogma than the others. Greene was familiar with bouts of depression, suicide attempts and adultery in his personal life. The gloom is pervasive, conveying the mid-20th century squalor and folly of an African colony. Greene wrote vividly about people and places he had experienced as a traveler and journalist. Later in his life he would describe himself as Catholic agnostic.

************

“The stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew the facts, he wondered, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they call the heart of the matter?”

[Georgia Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greene knew love. Her name was Vivian who gave "the trees shade, the flowers scent and the sun a gold it never had before." On their wedding day he wrote, "all the water in the world will be turned into wine." What he didn't count on after was the hangover.

The Heart of the Matter is painful as one. Yet, I felt no regret for reading it again. The first time I did, I was very young and newly married. I thought it was about an affair. Today, I turn the pages and see a marriage, born of love, still full of passion, yet broken beyond repair.

What inspiration Greene's own marriage gave to this novel matters less than the steadiness of his hand as he wrote it. I'm reminded with its tropical setting of my own experience trying to write a letter one summer in Japan. The ink spread in the heat on the paper. Words filled like eyes with tears.

Only read The Heart of the Matter if you're feeling strong.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had heard of this book, but it was the consistent references to it in Americanah, the protagonists mother loved it, that pushed me to read it. And, wow, was I impressed. It is the story of a police chief in an English colony in Africa and his failing marriage and the struggle with his conscious. A very, very Catholic story, it is moving and thought-provoking. There are few writers such as Greene that can turn a spy/police story into such a fantastic interior dialog about the sense of morality in an ultimately immoral zone and about the weight of decisions and their impacts. I won't go into details of the verious tangles that threaten to bring down our protagonist in an effort to avoid spoilers, but please believe me when I say that this book is beautifully written and its characters bleed real, red blood. A masterpiece.

Some quotes:
"Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed." (p. 30)

"It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but there was no comfort in that, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognised it. In the Cities of the Plain, a single soul may have changed the mind of God." (p. 123)

"He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration: but still one has one's eyes, he thought, one's eyes. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else absolute ignorance." (p. 125)

"A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible." (p. 138)

"One can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns." (p. 237)

"He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the color of sand." (p 254)

Our hero Scobie will have to decide between duty and love, and at the core of the novel we have this soul working its well towards either salvation or damnation.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction, by James Wood

--The Heart of the Matter

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5] Greene is always a pleasure to read and I enjoyed his sharp portrayal of a claustrophobic West African colony and its burdened citizens. But the heart of the matter here eludes me. Long-suffering Scobie's love affair with Helen felt implausible and childish. He relates to her as if she is a punishment. His Catholicism causes more pain. There must be an allegory happening here that is over my head. But Greene writes so well!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this years ago, and now upon re-reading I'm struck by how Greene pierces all that insufferable British colonial wartime mumbo-jumbo and shows the ineffable sadness behind the fake chumminess and the cold loneliness at the heart of the overseas bureaucracy.

The main character, Scobie, is tormented by his own betrayals: of his wife, his mistress, his job, and his God. Like so many of Greene's characters, he is at once the strongest and weakest of men--the one possessed of the most "goodness" and the most moral failure. He struggles with a way out of the various traps he's set for himself, and ultimately chooses....but no. I won't spoil it here. Suffice it to say that this is one of Greene's best for a reason. The inner tensions that rip through every page remind me of what Faulkner once said about the human heart at war with itself. And this really is all-out war: a life-or-death struggle waged beneath the polite surfaces of things.

[Loretta · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Graham Greene tends to be a little wordy for me, I did enjoy this book much more than The Quiet American. I was slightly disappointed though that when the story began speaking of suicide, I knew immediately how the book would end. Four stars.

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Heart of the Matter” zeroes in on mean gossip at the club and the loneliness of the British inhabitants in a West African colony based on Sierra Leone. The protagonist Scobie is a policeman and the one white character who gets on with the locals. The Africans aren't developed beyond a shadowy presence of saying “yes sah” or, in the case of women, stirring forbidden lust as they walk by. Africa is but a backdrop that allows the British to be alienated and inward-looking. Their small, closed society is claustrophobic, and when the rainy season comes this feeling is intensified.

Scobie’s wife Louise is a burden, she is falling apart in Africa but he wants to stay. He risks his reputation as a straight-shooting cop and borrows money from a Syrian businessman so he can send her to South Africa. While she is away, he starts an affair with a younger woman, Helen, a survivor of forty days in a lifeboat after a German submarine sunk her ship. Scobie’s affection for Helen is based on pity. The novel is set during the Second World War, but the war feels far away in West Africa.

Wilson, a newcomer to the colony, falls in love with Louise before she leaves and won't let Scobie get away with his behaviour. Never mind Wilson, Scobie’s Catholic faith won’t let him tolerate his own actions. Yusef, the Syrian he borrowed money from wants part of his soul too. There is a subplot about the Muslim Yusef and his Christian Syrian rival accusing each other of smuggling diamonds. The sleazy Yusef claims he wants Scobie's friendship but just ends up manipulating him.

The brilliance of this novel is in the relationship between two Brits in the colonial service: Scobie's enemy Wilson and the pitiable Harris. They bond over a game involving killing cockroaches, and then, as flatmates in a nipper hut, find out they went to the same public school back in England. They won’t admit their alienation began there. Both still wish for belonging – Wilson publishes a poem in the school magazine, and Harris wants to send a letter to tell the old boys of his whereabouts, which they have requested. However, in his heart, Harris knows they just want to hit him up for a donation.

Ali, Scobie’s boy (servant) is important in the plot but he is faintly sketched. Anthony Burgess would have given Ali a lot of comic idiosyncrasies and included scenes of him talking to other Africans about the Europeans. Burgess’s characterisations of locals would be far from politically correct by today’s standards, but through comic portrayals, he would have shown interest in them. Greene's Yusef can’t read or write but speaks perfect English. Burgess would have attempted a more realistic speech pattern and thrown in the odd word of Arabic. The Heart of the Matter can be compared to Burgess’s “Devil of the State”, a novel influenced by Greene and dedicated to him. Greene didn’t rate it though. Burgess’s fictional Dunia in East Africa (based on Brunei, see my review Devil of a State: A Novel) is more alive than Greene’s West Africa. But Burgess doesn’t have much of a plot in his vivid portrayal of a colony on the verge of independence. Local politics don’t interest Greene but The Heart of the Matter is tightly written and gripping for the first 150 pages. Then he goes deep into Scobie’s agony of guilt. I’m interested in Catholic themes of sin, guilt and redemption, but Greene takes an indulgently long time over the fall here. This was my first work by Greene in a decade. I enjoyed it without getting bowled over. Originally gave it three stars - it needs four.

F.E. Beyer is the author of Buenos Aires Triad

[booklady · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Heart of the Matter, although considered by many one of the best novels ever written, is thought by others a depressing, unhappy story. Certainly, the characters in Greene’s book bump and bang into each other, literally ‘bumping off’ themselves and those in their way, for what they believe is love.

Of course, it is about love. Real love. Not Romance, nor what most people think is love. Love isn’t sex, nor is it a feeling, nor is it ‘liking someone’. Reviewers and readers over the years have believed/claimed the main character, Henry Scobie, doesn’t love his wife, Louise. He certainly spends enough time debating this question, in his mind and with her. But what do his actions attest—at least in the beginning? Does he at least try to do what St. Paul says constitutes love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8? What else can or should a person do committed to love another? If a man persists in doing all that is right for another for the right reasons, don’t the actions speak for something? Don’t they speak to a greater love because they are so difficult? Love is easy when it is ‘fun’ or enjoyable’, but is that really ‘love’?

Scobie struggles with himself mightily throughout the novel. How he resolves this question as well as other dilemmas would spoil the book’s plot—and it is an extraordinary plot set on the Western coast of Africa during World War II.

Love and how it is expressed is central for other characters as well. Here is a partial quote from Father Rank confessing his admiration of Scobie in a particularly ironic scene: “When I was a novice, I thought people talked to their priests, and I thought God somehow gave the right words. Don’t mind me, Scobie, don’t listen to me. …I had a parish once in Northampton … I wasn’t of use to a single living soul. I never had much talent for loving God as some people do. I wanted to be of use, that’s all. Don’t listen to me. Its’s the rains. I haven’t talked like this for five years.” Despite all this honest self-deprecation, in the final scene in the book, Fr. Rank proved when the petal hit the metal, God gives the perfect words. It is usually the hearer who doesn’t listen. And Fr. Rank’s love for God was in his deeds as well as his words, though he didn’t realize it.

The Heart of the Matter is all about matters of the heart and what matters to the heart. We each have a different way of expressing these and mostly we go through life not understanding each other.

12/2/2021: Edited for grammatical errors

[J.C. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate my job. I hate my life. I hate my wife. I hate my mistress. I love God but hate him for making me Catholic. I hate my servant. I hate the guy blackmailing me. I hate the guy who's spying on me and is in love with my wife. I hate everyone around me. I hate that I might be going to Hell.

Well, I hate this book. I hate the story. I hate the characters. I hate the main characters name. I hate the setting. I hate the Catholic guilt that rears its useless head every third page. I hate the whiny wife. I hate the war time paranoia. I hate the beginning the middle and the end. I hate the "prose" and I really hate that I didn't throw this book in the trash when the notion hit me at page 30.

I might hate Graham Greene but I don't think I can know that until I read another book by him.

And that might be the thing I hate most of all.

[BrokenTune · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a review. I finished this book a week ago and have been trying to write a review for it several times but words just fail to describe the detachment I was left with on finishing.
So, instead of a review, here is a rant spurned by having wasted time on this book.

Yes, Greene's writing is wonderful - the wordsmithing, that is: the descriptions of the West African mid-war setting, the descriptions of pink gins, the descriptions of Scobie's thoughts.

However, none of this helped to warm to any of the characters, all of which seemed more than a little conceited most of all Major Scobie, the central character.

Scobie is described acting as man driven by Catholic morality, until he begins an affair with Helen, supposedly out of pity. Then his wife returns to him, he is torn between making a few decisions, and he returns to his wife - also out of pity.

Take away the element of Catholicism and Scobie is a pathetic character that can't make a decision and deludes himself into thinking that he does his best not to cause pain.

Leave in the Catholic element and Scobie is still pathetic and deluded.

I don't get this one.
Rant over.

(For a proper review of this book I'd recommend Kelly's review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... )