The Heart of the Matter (Vintage classics)

by Graham Greene

The book’s Catholic writhings were much discussed at the time of its publication. George Orwell, reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, formulated an objection which is difficult to counter: Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is—that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain—he would not be an officer in a colonial police force. In fact, the contradiction can be posed even more acutely than Orwell frames it. It is not so much Scobie’s lack of fear of hell that startles, but his willingness to surrender the very God he spends so much time praying to. If ‘human love’ can rob Scobie of his ‘love for eternity,’ then he was never a very passionate Christian; but if he is not the latter, why then his Christian passion? Another novelist’s reply might be that Scobie is simultaneously a passionate Christian and a passionate adulterer, and is sundered by these competing passions.