The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

[Leni]

The Heart of the Matter is set in West Africa, likely Sierra Leone, during WW2. The MC is a British policeman, the Deputy Commissioner in the area. He has been 15 years in the colony and has grown somewhat disillusioned, but he is still an honest and compassionate man. Because he neither takes bribes nor kisses up to the right people, he is bypassed for a younger, more political man when the Commissioner retires. His wife is not happy about this. She's not happy about most things, in fact, and can't stand living in the colony any more. She is lonely. She wants to go to South Africa. And her husband would like nothing better than for her to go to South Africa and be happy, and live him alone to the simple pleasures of working and living in a country he has come to love. But how does an underpaid, honest policeman get enough money to send his wife to South Africa, and maintain her there, in wartime?

Also on the scene we have two competing Syrian merchants, and likely diamond smugglers. We have a spy sent undercover from England to look into why no diamonds are ever intercepted at the port. We have the Vichy French across the river. We have all manner of ships coming into port. And we have a populace who seem to live for gossip and ferreting things out. And through it all we have the natives, the "house boys", universally employed for all manner of tasks, and otherwise ignored and written off as ignorant. In short, we have all the makings of an interesting story! And yet... and yet...

...in the end this is all about Catholic Guilt, with a capital G. Everything boils down to a crisis of faith. Apparently going to communion without having repented your sins before is a more horrible crime than murder. And all these interesting threads unravel under the strain of religious angst. I like the way Greene writes, but do all his books come down to the strain of Catholicism? (I've only read two, the first being The End of the Affair)

It was, for a while, an interesting and very strange look at a British colony in West Africa. It took me a while to realise that when the characters referred to their servants as "boy" and "small boy", these were actually job titles and the "boys" were grown men. I did have some trouble feeling sympathy for the poor colonial overlords suffering from the climate and ennui while their "boys" were up and out and about doing their bidding at any hour of the day.

[Jamie]

In this book Mr. Scobie, a policeman working in a colonial town in West Africa, finds himself involved in an extramarital affair when his wife goes away for an extended stay in South Africa. He finds his psychological burden as a result of this affair intolerable. Or, perhaps he finds that his mistress, his wife, and everyone else who he believed needed him can really do just fine without him, so that his vanity suffered a massive and intolerable blow. I found him self-righteous and self-centered, and thought his dilemma seemed more like the tantrum of a spoiled brat, rather than the decisions of a tormented adult.
The book was good, the writing is excellent, and I am glad I never dated, let alone married a man like Mr. Scobie. The setting of this book is colonial West Africa, with all the racial stratifications and racism that went with that era of West African history, but the relationships between the native people, the White colonists (French & English mostly), and the Syrians are complex and varied. The houseboys' relationships with their employers show how the colonists make use of local people, but also how over time some of the colonists forget that the local people are dark skinned. Similarly as some of the colonist men have been in the town a while they find that they admire beautiful women and no longer just see unadmire-able black bodies. The pressures of WW2 impose extra rules on the town's inhabitants, and at the moment the White colonials hold the power, but you can also get a sense that assimilation is going on, so long as the various groups of people in the town are just going about their daily lives in peace. We all know that peaceful coexistence never lasted for any of the former West African colonies, but in this book there is a sense of hope for the future of this local community, even as the idiot Scobie is ruining his own life.

I gave this book 5 stars.

[Gail]

Graham Greene's Catholic themed books always tweak me slightly negatively although I am sympathetic to his more humanistic themes of love, betrayal, and disappointment in one's self and in one's fellow man. This book is really one of his richest in terms of taking a small handful of characters and building a small world. The book takes place in what is probably Sierra-Leone and reflects the time that Greene spent there during WWII. The dark nature of a colonial capital is very alive in this book with many international characters including Syrian diamond smugglers and home office spies. The Main Character is Scobie who firmly believes that it is his place to put things right while he systematically goes about bungling everything up so those people he cares about the most are hurt. He himself slowly betrays everything he has stood for in his life. It is a good read but Scobie's shaken faith and what that faith twists him into ultimately was irritating.