Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter was published in 1948. It became an instant best-seller and has been reprinted many times and won awards and high praise.
In 1926 Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church and, not surprisingly, several novels of his deal with characters bound by that faith. Major Scobie, the police chief of a flyblown West African colony during the Second World War, is one such.
Inspector Wilson is a new arrival: ‘He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy’ (p11). Wilson shares accommodation with Harris and there’s an amusing episode where the pair start a cockroach hunt – The Cockroach Championship – to alleviate boredom (p70).
Scobie has been here for fifteen years and feels comfortably bound to the place. ‘Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself?’ (p35).
Unfortunately, his rather faded wife Louise wants to have a break, to go away on holiday. Scobie feels guilty that Louise is not happy. The bank won’t lend Scobie the money as his salary is not generous and, indeed, he has just been passed over for the post of Commissioner. In a moment of weakness, he accepts a loan from a local Syrian merchant, Yusef, who is a known black marketeer though no proof has ever been found. ‘He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation’ (p60).
While Louise is away in South Africa Scobie begins a clandestine affair with a refugee from a sunken transport ship, a young widow, Helen. He is aware he is committing the grave sin of adultery. He argues it is not a sin, it is love. And doomed.
There are several themes: guilt, sin, avarice, blackmail, deceit, love and trust. ‘Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar’ (p264).
As the book blurb indicates, ‘inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster’.
There are too many examples of Greene’s prose imagery to note here, but the following are examples:
‘There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term’ (p55).
These two, among many other insights in the book, suggest he drew upon his time as an Intelligence Officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone:
‘The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines’ (p112). ‘... a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper drone of dive-bombers’ (p122).
‘Only the vultures were about – gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that’ (p230).
Editorial comment:
I’ve brought this up before; something that editors don’t spot: the tendency for writers to state a character thought to himself or herself. This really is tautological. ‘He thought’ is adequate; ‘to himself/herself’ is superfluous.
‘He
thought to himself, poor Louise’ (p17). Also on p53...
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