User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
(Book 551 from 1001 books) - The Heart of The Matter, Graham GreeneThe Heart of the Matter (1948) is a novel by English author Graham Greene. The book details a life-changing moral crisis for Henry Scobie.
Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork...
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 develops the foundation of a story by turns 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.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هشتم ماه دسامبر سال1987میلادی
عنوان: جان کلام؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: حسین حجازی؛ تهران، بهاران، سال1365، در335ص موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده20م
عنوان: جان کلام؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: پرتو اشراق؛ تهران، نیلوفر، روز پانزدهم ماه دیماه سال1383، در328ص شابک9789644482176؛
کتاب «جان کلام» نوشته «گراهام گرین» رماننویس، نمایشنامه نویس، و منتقد ادبی «بریتانیا» است؛ ایشان یکی از پرکارترین نویسندگان سده ی بیستم میلادی بوده اند؛ که علاوه بر نویسندگی، در رویدادهای مهم آن سالها نیز، نقش داشته؛ و شاهد تحولات دوران مدرن بوده اند؛ در این کتاب قهرمان اصلی داستان، یک مرد است؛ پس زمینه ی داستان، سواحل غربی «آفریقا»، در زمان جنگ جهانی دوم است، و قهرمان داستان، یک سرگرد پلیس و معاون کمیسر شهر، به نام سرگرد «اسکوبی» است؛ که در دنیای پر از شایعه ی «آفریقایی»، در میان سفیدپوستان، عربها، هندیها، و آفریقائیهای سیاه پوست، زندگی میکند؛ در همان نخستین اوراق داستان، خوانشگر باخبر میشود، که وی مردی درستکار است، که به رغم تمام قابلیتهایش به عنوان جانشین برای کمیسر پلیس، در نظر گرفته نشده است، و قرار است جانشینی جوانتر از او، این پست را به دست بگیرد؛ هر چند این خبر، باعث مأیوس شدن همسرش میشود، اما «اسکوبی» خود، اهمیت اندکی به این مسئله میدهد؛ او عاشق شغل، و سرزمینی که در آن زندگی میکند، است؛ کتاب «جان کلام گرین» به مطامع بشری اشاره دارند، که حد و مرزی نمیشناسد؛
نقل از آغاز متن: («ویلسون» در بالکن «هتل بدفورد» نشست؛ زانوهای بی مو، و گلگونش را، به زور میان نرده ها جای داد؛ یکشنبه بود، و زنگ کلیسا، مردم را به دعای صبحگاهی فرا میخواند؛ آنسوی خیابان باند، پشت پنجره های دبیرستان، دخترهای سیاهپوست، با لباس ورزشی آبی سیر، نشسته بودند، و به کار تمام نشدنی فرزدن موهای تاب خورده ی خود مشغول بودند، ویلسون دستی به سبیل تازه دمیده اش کشید، و در انتظار آوردن جین و لیمویش به رویا فرو رفت؛ نشسته بود، رو به خیابان باند و چشم به سوی دریا داشت؛ رنگ زردش نشان میداد، که اخیرا از سفر دریایی، قدم به خشکی نهاده، و اشتیاقی هم به دیدن دختران روبرو ندارد؛ مثل عقربه کند هواسنجی شده بود، که هنوز هم با وجود توفان، هوای خوب و مساعد را، نشان میدهد؛ آن پایین، کارمندان سیاه، که با زنانشان در لباسهای روشن، به رنگ آبی و قرمز، به کلیسا میرفتند، هیچ احساسی در «ویلسون» برنمیانگیختند؛ در بالکن تنها بود، سوای «هندی» ریشوی عمامه به سری که قبلاً سعی کرده بود، طالعش را بگوید: آن روز بخت، با سفیدها یار نبود؛ در آنوقت روز، آنها کنار ساحلی، در پنج مایلی آنجا بودند؛ اما «ویلسون» اتومبیل نداشت؛ تقریبا به طور تحمل ناپذیری، احساس تنهایی میکرد؛ از هر طرف ساختمان مدرسه، سقفهای حلبی، به جانب دریا شیب داشت، و آهن موجدار بالای سرش، وقتی لاشخوری روی آن فرود میآمد، دَرَنگ دَرَنگ صدا میکرد)»؛ پایان نقل؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 23/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 16/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
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."
Rating: really liked it
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 Green 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.
Rating: really liked it
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."
Rating: really liked it
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 (view spoiler)
[ culminating in the assassination of his trusted coloured personal servant (hide spoiler)] . 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 (view spoiler)
[ thankfully, it didn't get anywhere near murder (hide spoiler)], 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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
Book Circle Reads 35Rating: 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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
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?
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
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.
Rating: really liked it
Introduction, by James Wood--The Heart of the Matter
