The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter, a classic by Graham Greene, is the tale of a fine man caught up in passion, deceit, and wickedness in a seaside West African hamlet. Scobie is obligated to uphold rigorous ethics in his capacity as assistant police commissioner and to his wife, Louise, whom he loves fatally.
When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he discovers that his essential passion is once more subordinated to pity, his honour is subordinated to dishonesty and deceit, and that this spiral eventually leads to murder. As Scobie’s world implodes, his personal crises create the framework for a narrative that is at once intriguing, thrilling, and ultimately devastating.
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
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The common man was freed from the stresses of survival in the 20th century for the first time, allowing him to reflect on his existence, the expectations placed on him, and what he might hope to gain from society. As George Orwell had observed, he could look in the mirror and see what was most difficult to notice: what was directly in front of his nose.
Graham Greene may have been the writer who held up this mirror to our brain the most creatively and honestly. As Orwell did in “Burmese Days,” he explains the effort of a man to act honourably, to be a good guy, and to do the right thing in increasingly difficult conditions by presenting the tale of an English policeman in colonial West Africa.
The circumstances include his futile attempts to maintain his wife’s happiness and his sense of obligation toward some nebulous debt to her, even as she consistently assumes the role of capricious, unreliable female supplicant – a role that women characters frequently play in many novels, as Joseph Conrad noted in Heart of Darkness. Greene seems to be suggesting that every one of us must make decisions in an unfair, imperfect world of Original Sin if we are to get closer to living a life of integrity after a lengthy introduction and some extremely overt melodrama, but also some nicely-turned words and well-crafted character development. Even if God is infinitely patient with us, we must embrace difficult choices, even if they may lead to negative consequences.
