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.
Greene spent his university years at Oxford "drunk and debt-ridden," and claimed to have played Russian roulette as an antidote to boredom. At age 21 he converted to Roman Catholicism, later saying, "I had to find a religion...to measure my evil against." His first published novel, The Man Within, did well enough to earn him an advance from his publishers, but though Greene quit his job as a Times subeditor to write full-time, his next two novels were unsuccessful. Finally, pressed for money, he set out to write a work of popular fiction. Stamboul Train (also published as The Orient Express) was the first of many commercial successes.
Throughout the 1930s, Greene wrote novels, reviewed books and movies for the Spectator, and traveled through eastern Europe, Liberia, and Mexico. One of his best-known works, Brighton Rock, was published during this time; The Power and the Glory, generally considered Greene's masterpiece, appeared in 1940. Along with The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, they cemented Greene's reputation as a serious novelist -- though George Orwell complained about Greene's idea "that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only."
During World War II, Greene was stationed in Sierra Leone, where he worked in an intelligence capacity for the British Foreign Office under Kim Philby, who later defected to the Soviet Union. After the war, Greene continued to write stories, plays, and novels, including The Quiet American, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, and The Captain and the Enemy. For a time, he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, producing both original screenplays and scripts adapted from his fiction.
He also continued to travel, reporting from Vietnam, Haiti, and Panama, among other places, and he became a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Some biographers have suggested that his friendships with Communist leaders were a ploy, and that he was secretly gathering intelligence for the British government. The more common view is that Greene's leftist leanings were part of his lifelong sympathy with the world's underdogs -- what John Updike called his "will to compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class."
But if Greene's politics were sometimes difficult to decipher, his stature as a novelist has seldom been in doubt, in spite of the light fiction he produced. Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and R. K. Narayan paid tribute to his work, and William Golding prophesied: "He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
Greene was a film critic, screenwriter, and avid moviegoer, and critics have sometimes praised the cinematic quality of his style. His most famous screenplay was The Third Man, which he cowrote with director Carol Reed. Recently, new film adaptations have been made of Greene's novels The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Greene's work has also formed the basis for an opera: Our Man in Havana, composed by Malcolm Williamson.
Anonymous
Posted August 1, 2008
Graham Greene is my favorite author and this book just adds to my esteem of him. Scobie is a police officer who cannot resist saving and comforting the pitiable aspects of people and life. His wife's 'ugliness' 'more than just the physical' and his pity of that keeps him only interested in making her happy...until he is granted freedom when she decides to travel to the south of Africa with a friend. Then, he is drawn by pity to a recently married and more recently widowed survivor of a sinking ship. His feelings of love, guilt, and responsibility for both women come to a head when his wife returns. The religious inner dialogue of this novel and all of Greene's works that I've read provide insights into my life and my world that are timeless. This book was published in 1948 and it speaks to me more than fiction that I've read published this year. I recommend Greene's writing, not just this novel, because once you begin reading you can trust that he will deliver a thought-provoking and awakening piece of writing.
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Posted November 5, 2000
I stumbled onto Graham Greene in a roundabout way, so I failed to anticipate his stature as an Important Novelist; I thought he was a man who wrote books that were turned into excellent films, and then I read a short story by him called 'The Basement Room' that happened to be posted online. What a revelation. The previous reviewer griped about the religiosity of this book, but novels as complex and careful about their characters as this one--and Greene is one of the most acid and assiduous chroniclers of the indecisions of the heart as any I have encountered--are not so easily pigeonholed into decisions about morality. His Major Scobie is torn between conflicting senses of duty--to his church, and to his two women--and in the end it is uncertain after all whether he was a weak man or a strong man, and whether he was a good man or bad. The dialogues are crisp and exact; characters revolve in their own constricting passions; and the colonial life is drawn unsentimentally and candidly. Greene is a master craftsman, and his moralizations evolve from character; not, I believe, vice versa.
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Posted October 28, 2000
After reading three other works by Greene I have come to the conclusion that his works belong under the category religious fiction. In this novel, once again the main action is driven by questions of faith. Scobie, a police officer in Africa during WWII, finds himself dangling between adultery and faith, corruption and justice, punishment and understanding. Two thirds of the book is excellent but Greene seems to use the loss of faith to tidy up the ends of his books because he can see no other way for characters to get out of their situations unless they fall prostrate before the Roman Catholic Church. While the characterization is good most of the novel, they turn into caricatures by the end and lose their identity. This book is very similar to his other novel, The End of the Affair, and is similarly disappointing. I am beginning to agree with some other critics that maybe Greene will not be as important as a novelist in the future and will be seen as merely average or mediocre in generations to come.
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Posted October 19, 2000
Probably one of the best written English novels I have ever read. The fall of a man's soul, debated in a destructive conflict between ancient principles and cultural restraints, and discovered needs and emotions. As a background, a back-door view of the 'glories' of colonization: a little hell for expatriots and Africans alike. Don't expect a lot of suspense, but a short, keen, immensely introspective search for truth and human dignity.
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Overview
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 ...