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The Heart of the Matter

graham greene

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In a British colony in West Africa, Henry Scobie is a pious and righteous man of modest means enlisted with securing borders. But when he’s passed over for a promotion as commissioner of police, the humiliation hits hardest for his wife, Louise. Already oppressed by the appalling climate, frustrated in a loveless marriage, and belittled by the wives of more privileged officers, Louise wants out.

Feeling responsible for her unhappiness, Henry decides against his better judgment to accept a loan from a black marketeer to secure Louise’s passage. It’s just a single indiscretion, yet for Henry it precipitates a rapid fall from grace as one moral compromise after another leads him into a web of blackmail, adultery, and murder. And for a devout man like Henry, there may be nothing left but damnation.

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1948
Literary awards
james tait black memorial prize, 
Places
africa, west africa, 

This edition

Format
272 pages, Paperback
Published
November 2, 2004 by Vintage Classics
ISBN
9780099478423
ASIN
0099478420
Language
English
Characters More characters

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About the author

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graham greene

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Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
32(32%)
4 stars
27(27%)
3 stars
40(40%)
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99 reviews All reviews
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EthanO11
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Reseña en 5 minutos y al dictado

*2.5

Mi opinión se resume en tres palabras: se deja leer. Sin más.

Graham Greene nos presenta en esta obra las zancadillas que le pone la vida a un protagonista aparentemente incorruptible y devoto de Dios. La trama, aunque en algún momento me llegó a despistar por pensar que el libro tomaría otros derroteros, se centra completamente en dilemas morales, asuntos de fe y demás entresijos del ser humano.

Me gustan mucho las obras que tratan de temas éticos, pero en este caso las digresiones sobre comulgar sin confesarse o condenarse si uno se suicida y demás tribulaciones que a mí me suenan a catolicismo trasnochado… me han llegado a parecer un tostón.

Si se ha dejado leer, ha sido sobre todo por la buena pluma del autor, que ofrece párrafos memorables, y por esa ambientación de calor pegajoso que lo acaba envolviendo todo, al parecer basada en las vivencias del autor en Sierra Leona, aunque con algunas cucarachas de visita podría haber sido el comedor de mi casa a 30°C en estas tardes del mes de julio.

P.S. Leer este libro en compañía de otros viajeros lectores por el mundo me ha facilitado la lectura e incluso el haberme fijado en pasajes como el capítulo final, al que le encontré el significado en una segunda lectura tras escuchar sus comentarios, pues supongo que entre el tostón de algunos pasajes y el calor de mi comedor de Sierra Leona mi mente ya no captaba nada.

Si vuelvo a repetir en algún momento con Graham Greene será con otro tipo de obra.
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Bunroeun
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Henry Graham Green is considered one of the best authors of the 20th Century. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair. This book details a life-changing moral crisis for Henry Scobie. Greene, a British intelligence officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone, drew on his experience there. Although Freetown is not mentioned in the novel, Greene confirms the location in his 1980 memoir, Ways of Escape. Ironically, the hero of this book, Major Scobie, is named Henry.

Henry Scobie undergoes a major moral crisis in this story. He works for the government and at least part of his job is inspecting incoming ships. He is second in command to the Commissioner. When the Commissioner announces his retirement, Scobie is bypassed for the promotion. His wife, Louise, is devastated that he has not been promoted. She is so embarrassed, she decides to leave and live in South Africa. Things get complicated because of and after that.

The book started a little slow for me, but once I began to understand and get to know the characters and their relationships, I really liked the book. Henry Scobie is a Catholic, but certainly not a model one. He engages in questionable activities, but still seems to have a conscience.

That's all I'll say... anything else would spoil the book.

4 stars
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Momo-chan07
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I love Greene so much. He's so wretchedly tortured and miserable and compassionate and visual and I love his writing so bloody much.
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TimeStopSamurai
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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به بهانه زادروز گراهام گرین گزارش نشست پیارسال ما را بخوانید


بررسی جهان داستانی گراهام گرین در نشست بوطیقا
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Cerber_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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3,7* Literatura colonial con tintes religiosos, problemas morales, corrupción y una climatología opresiva. Es una mezcla que impresiona y que me ha gustado bastante, pero no le pongo la cuarta estrella porque en algunos momentos las disyuntivas que plantea me parecen algo absurdas.

En plena segunda guerra mundial, el comandante de policía Scobie, un hombre íntegro, soporta como puede a una mujer insoportable, y aunque ya no la quiere dedica todos sus esfuerzos a hacerla feliz - por compasión, dice. Tengo que decir que este planteamiento ya me chirría bastante. Cuando ella se va a Sudáfrica, él conocerá a otra persona con la que vive una pasión teñida de tristeza y culpa. Su religión católica le hace vivir con miedo a la condenación eterna, y esta misma angustia va complicando su situación progresivamente.

Me ha gustado la descripción del ambiente de la colonia, que él conocía bien, ya que durante la guerra estuvo destinado en Sierra Leona. Su estilo es magnífico y es una lectura que se disfruta, a pesar de toda la oscuridad y el pesimismo vital que respira.

Scobie pensó más tarde que era el confín máximo que su felicidad había conocido: estar en la oscuridad, solo, bajo la lluvia, libre de amor o de compasión.

Yo diría incluso pesimismo cósmico:

Se detuvo de nuevo frente a la casa de descanso. De no haber sabido lo que iluminaban, las luces del interior hubieran dado una impresión de paz extraordinaria, del mismo modo que las estrellas de aquella noche clara proporcionaban impresión de lejanía, seguridad y libertad. Si uno supiera, se preguntó, si uno alcanzara lo que llamaban 'el revés de la trama', ¿tendría que compadecer incluso a los planetas?
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Xyfang
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Greene's big disappointment was that he did not win the Nobel Prize. After reading this I can understand both his disappointment and the committee's decision. Of course many great writers never get that call from Sweden, but Greene was a perennial contender. This was a brilliant tale, a superbly plotted look at the life of a basically decent man in an unfashionable West African colony during World War II. And althou the book grapples with questions of God and morality, love, sex, and duty, somehow it still comes off as being a little too glib, a little superficial. Yet it is this same quality which allows for no drag on the plot or the wit, and is party responsible for Greene's great commercial success.

This book, one of his earlier efforts, is often considered the best novel of his career. It concerns a police official named Henry Scobie, second in command of a colonial police headquarters in an unnamed country (probably Sierra Leone). An honest, regular guy, devoted to duty and the Catholic religion, Scobie finds himself in a series of situations that begin to operate like a net closing in around him. His marriage has run dry, and Greene depicts the tired and drained relations of Louise and Henry Scobie flawlessly, as they toss private cliches and little arrows back and forth at one another. A younger man named Wilson appears in town, and he falls stupidly in love with the cynical Louise. To complicate matters, he is some sort of an intelligence agent and has suspicions about the protagonist.

Scobie puts himself in harm's way by allowing himself to be drawn into the circle of the cunning Syrian crook Yusef. The author depicts superbly how a decent man can find his compassion used to ensnare him in a web of increasing obligations. After his wife goes away for an undeclared trial separation, Scobie falls for a young woman just rescued from a tragedy at sea. His wife returns, and Scobie begins getting torn apart by internal forces, his passions, obligations, his guilt over his slip into corruption, and most of all his belief that he has become a sinner and possibly en route to damnation.

The pages never stop turning, and the dry, cynical clarity of the writing is equally relentless - not for him the long-winded description or the deeply examined emotion. Greene's stuff can seem a little thin, but it is undoubtedly great story-telling.
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RoodyChan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I had heard of this book, but it was the consistent references to it in Americanah, the protagonists mother loved it, that pushed me to read it. And, wow, was I impressed. It is the story of a police chief in an English colony in Africa and his failing marriage and the struggle with his conscious. A very, very Catholic story, it is moving and thought-provoking. There are few writers such as Greene that can turn a spy/police story into such a fantastic interior dialog about the sense of morality in an ultimately immoral zone and about the weight of decisions and their impacts. I won't go into details of the verious tangles that threaten to bring down our protagonist in an effort to avoid spoilers, but please believe me when I say that this book is beautifully written and its characters bleed real, red blood. A masterpiece.

Some quotes:
"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 meannesses that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed." (p. 30)

"It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but there was no comfort in that, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognised it. In the Cities of the Plain, a single soul may have changed the mind of God." (p. 123)

"He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration: but still one has one's eyes, he thought, one's eyes. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else absolute ignorance." (p. 125)

"A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible." (p. 138)

"One can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns." (p. 237)

"He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the color of sand." (p 254)

Our hero Scobie will have to decide between duty and love, and at the core of the novel we have this soul working its well towards either salvation or damnation.
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Unregistered00
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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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."
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