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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN num: 9780142437995
ISBN number: 0142437999
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: September 28, 2004
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Release Date: September 28, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 338441
Studio: Penguin Classics
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With a new introduction by James Wood
Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime west-African state, is distrusted — being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in so doing, he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.
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Rated by buyers 
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'My experiences in Sierra Leone were rich enough, but I have never been satisfied with what I made of them.' So Graham Greene wrote in 1980, three decades after his publication of 'The Heart of the Matter.' Ever a tough self-critic, the novel has been far better received by scholars and audiences than Greene himself. This widespread sucess has helped to establish Greene as one of the twentieth century's leading British novelists and, with figures such as Evelyn Waugh, Paul Claudel, and François Mauriac, as one of the greatest Roman Catholic writers in modern history.
First published in 1948, 'The Heart of the Matter' was inspired by Greene's life as a British intelligence officer in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Greene, mixing his Catholic background with immense skills in fiction, journalism, and travel writing, penned a social drama that is arguably the best of his career. It earned the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain's version of the Pulitzer, in its very first impression and reached Time Magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Taking place in a Sierra Leone township during wartime, Greene draws vividly from his experiences as an MI6 official and the well-known irregularities of his love life. He immerses us with the novel's opening pages into a hot, humid, and malaria-ridden territory of coastal British Africa; the sweat on one's arms, the constant feeling of being watched, and the sound of vultures clopping on tin roofs predominate this scene. The locals of Sierra Leone - those of the Black underclass - are illiterate, often born out of wedlock, and fill roles comparable to slavery.
Against this musty backdrop, Greene paints his characters with a simple, journalistic flair. The focal point is Henry Scobie, a deputy commissioner who is subsequent in line to head the colony's police department. Scobie and his wife Louise are devout Catholics who seem out of place in their African surroundings: Scobie, while regarded as an honest and efficient officer, is distrusted by his colleagues for being too above-board. Louise is an aloof and opportunistic woman who has little in common with her husband, including a thirst for social advancement and a love of poetry. Yet their relationship endures in this bleak setting; marriage has once again become a 'habit,' as Greene so often laments.
Scobie's main asset - a sympathy for those around him - is also his most glaring weakness. Consumed by a police state where unhappiness reigns, Scobie damages his integrity by taking loans from Yusef, a Syrian gem trafficker, in order to send Louise on a costly relocation to South Africa. While Louise is away, he falls in love with Helen Rolt, a young woman who managed to survive days at sea following a boating accident that killed her just-married husband. Scobie discovers his faith as a Catholic, the one power he can turn to, unraveling in this chaos while at the same time galvanizing his link with the divine. This happens while a London spy named Wilson, who holds childish feelings for Louise, keeps a watchful eye and happily reports to his superiors.
'The Heart of the Matter,' written at the peak of Greene's literary abilities, is a novel with superb emotional depth and range. Much of the story takes place as an interior monologue that follows Scobie's ensuing crises in love, faith, and the will to live. While firmly rooted in Greene's Catholic outlook, the novel extends beyond his faith and deals with universal concepts of self-respect, compassion, and decency: how can one maintain his truthfulness, Greene asks, in a world of lies and deceit? Should we really have intolerance for deceit when the world appears so rotten? And is total understanding between human beings possible when compared to the definiteness of a man's spirituality?
Compared to earlier novels such as 'England Made Me' and 'Brighton Rock,' 'The Heart of the Matter' has better-developed characters, a more cohesive plot, and solid narration. Greene still falls into an overuse of simile and certain events don't happen with a feeling of the inevitable, but 'Matter' still ranks as one of the best-written novels in twentieth century literature and holds a deserving place in Green's 'Catholic' cycle of novels that secured his legacy.
'The Heart of the Matter' is a frequently-printed novel that can be acquired in used copies on the Internet. Used for this review was the 1960 printing by Compass Books (C70, 306 pages), a subsidiary of The Viking Press. More recent editions have appeared from Penguin Books and Vintage Classics. The novel is an absolute must for Greene fans and highly recommended for all serious readers.
Rated by buyers 
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Over forty years ago a new English teacher at my school answered a question asked by an eager student. The question was, "What do you think is the greatest novel written in English?" He didn't think for very long before replying, "The Heart Of The Matter."
We academically-inclined youths borrowed Graham Greene's novel from the library and eventually conferred. There were shrugs, some indifference, appreciation without enthusiasm. We were all about sixteen years old.
I last re-read The Heart Of The Matter about twenty-five years ago. When I began it again for the fourth time last week, I could still remember vividly the basics of its characters and plot. Henry Scobie is an Assistant Chief of Police in a British West African colony. It is wartime and he has been passed over for promotion. He is fifty-ish, wordly-wise, apparently pragmatic, a sheen that hides a deeply analytical conscience. Louise, his wife is somewhat unfocusedly unhappy with her lot. She is a devout Catholic and this provides her support, but the climate is getting to everyone. She leaves for a break that Scobie cannot really afford. He accepts debt.
The colony's businesses are run by Syrians. Divisions within their community have roots deeper than commercial competition. There is "trade" of many sorts. There are accusations, investigations, rumours and counter-claims. Special people arrive to look into things. There's a suicide, more than one, in fact, at least one murder, an extra-marital affair, blackmail, family and wartime tragedy.
But above all there is the character of Henry Scobie. He is a man of principle who thinks he is a recalcitrant slob. He is a man of conscience who presents a pragmatic face. He makes decisions fully aware of their consequences, but remains apparently unable to influence the circumstance that repeatedly seems to dictate events. He remains utterly honest in his deceit, consistent in his unpredictability. His life becomes a beautiful, uncontrolled mess. His wife's simple orthodox Catholicism contrasts with his never really adopted faith. He tries to keep face, but cannot reconcile the facts of his life with the demands of his conscience. His ideals seem to have no place in a world where interests overrule principle. He sees a solution, a way out, but perhaps it is a dead end.
For twenty-first century sensibilities, the colonial era attitudes towards local people appear patronising at best. Perhaps that is how things were. But The Heart Of The Matter is not really a descriptive work. It is not about place and time. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, the events and their setting provide only a backdrop and context for a deeply moving examination of motive and conscience. And also like a Shakespearean tragedy, the novel transcends any limitations of its setting to say something unquestionably universal about the human condition. Forty years on, I now realise, that my new English teacher was probably right.
Rated by buyers -
Graham Greene does something in The Heart of the Matter which is extremely difficult to do: he depicts the inner turmoil and emotional breakdown of a human being in a non-pretentious, non-self-conscious, completely BELIEVABLE way.
So many other allegedly great authors have tried to do the same thing, with very few successes. Most often you get turgid "prose" which reeks of pseudo-intellectual showboating, turning the character in question from a flesh-and-blood entity into a cipher, which leads to a predictable conclusion that you could not care less about.
Greene avoids that lot and achieves true profundity. I was impressed almost in spite of myself, because I previously did not conceive of him as a front-ranker, and I have no truck with religious mores. I still don't think he is an all-time genius, but I DO think that there was something beyond sheer erudition and assiduity to the man...something which the gods either confer or don't.
The MLA asserts that The Heart of the Matter is the 40th best novel of the 20th century, which underrates it...at least compared to some of the books--e.g., Henderson, the Rain King; To The Lighthouse--which are ranked higher. But enough time wasted on the MLA...
The novel starts off slowly, almost prosaically--you may think to yourself "What's the fuss?" for a hundred pages. But then comes the moment when the protagonist, Scobie, comforts a dying girl in two outstanding paragraphs...and from that point the book shifts into high gear.
Things begin to happen abruptly, but not in a manipulative, writer's-construct way--they have the patina of real life, where sometimes years of equilibrium are disturbed by life-altering events which occur in rapid succession. (Greene--mirroring life, perhaps--does leave a few loose ends.) I am as keenly attuned to factitiousness as a hog to truffles, but I never caught a whiff of artifice.
Aw, Christ, just read it.
Rated by buyers -
The setting for Greene's novel, although never named, is Sierra Leone, where the author himself spent some time as an intelligence officer. But law enforcement, subterfuge, and colonialism serve as mere (if occasionally satiric) sideshows for the crisis of faith of one well-meaning, upright policeman, Scobie, whose fatal flaw is a sometimes-misguided sympathy for those closest to him.
Even Scobie's troubled relationship with his wife is described early on as one in which "pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion," hardly the emotions on which an untroubled marriage can be based. Both marital duty and a sense of guilt prompt the very first of his many offenses; to allow her an extended vacation away from the colony, an extravagance they can't afford, he must compromise his integrity. Then, while his wife is away, "pity and responsibility" in no small part lead Scobie to fall in love with a woman rescued from a shipwreck. In Scobie's confused mind, adultery seems equally an act of selfless compassion and an act of selfish passion. And the series of lies required to maintain this relationship quickly turns the path he has chosen into a maze he can't escape.
And into the maze he goes, at the center of which is damnation. To many non-Catholics, Scobie's decline might seem the result not only of real sins (bribery, adultery) but also of the trappings of seemingly arbitrary rules that rely more on religious dogma than on a universal morality--for example, taking Communion in a state of "sin," a violation presented as if it were one of the worst breaches Scobie could commit. While this "mortal" sin is only one of several steps in his apostasy, his subsequent angst is depicted in legalistic terms rather than moral ones. The walls of the maze are constructed as much by the rules of his faith (and the corresponding damage to his own peace of mind) as by acts that genuinely hurt others.
What saves this discusion from a doctrinal parochialism is the fact that Greene himself seems unsure of the relative value of faith (an individual matter) and of charity (the desire to do well to others). Scobie's slide down the slippery slope is a series of actions that, in no small part, are well meaning--his very first crime, burning a contraband personal letter written in German, which might or might not contain secret code, is certainly meant as an act of kindness to a fellow Catholic. His sins and their consequences can't hide the heart of the matter: Scobie is a good man. There's more than a little mockery when Father Rank says, "The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart." The real question, Greene seems to be asking: who are we to judge?
Finally, the reader is well advised to avoid the so-called "introduction" by James Wood in the Penguin Centennial edition of this novel; Wood's spoiler-filled summary of the plot, its various twists, and the book's ending are so thorough as to make reading Greene's text itself beside the point.
Rated by buyers -
It's hard for me to review The Heart of the Matter without mentioning The Power and the Glory, so I won't even try. While many people think The Power and the Glory is Greene's tragic masterpiece, I think the case could be made for this book. In a way, The Heart of the Matter is the reciprocal of The Power and the Glory - instead of leading a fairly villainous protagonist on a path to redemption through death at the hands of the ruling authority, it takes a basically good authority figure, the police commissioner Scobie, down a path to both spiritual damnation and public and private ridicule. I find it ironic that Scobie's one abuse of his power, sleeping with a native, is but one of the many committed by the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, and the final act of each, suicide, is seen as heroic in The Power and the Glory, and quite pitiful in The Heart of the Matter. The is of course easily attributable to Greene's Catholic obsession with redemption - the whiskey priest proclaims his sinful nature and the narrator forgives (and deifies) him, while Scobie (and the narrator) clings to his own essential goodness - thus the sin of pride is what ultimately prevents Scobie from either human or divine forgiveness. This is problematic at best and arrogant at worst for an audience unconcerned with godly redemption. I would fall into the godless swine category, which is why I find Scobie so much more likeable than the whiskey priest, and why I find his ultimate ruin so much more tragic. And if we're rating tragedy, isn't that the most important indicator?
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