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.

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

I love Greene so much. He's so wretchedly tortured and miserable and compassionate and visual and I love his writing so bloody much.

به بهانه زادروز گراهام گرین گزارش نشست پیارسال ما را بخوانید


بررسی جهان داستانی گراهام گرین در نشست بوطیقا

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?

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.

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.

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."

I can’t imagine not liking any Graham Greene book, but that’s mostly just because he takes us to so many luridly original settings. I prefer Orwell’s Burmese Days to any Greene book, but Greene seems to understand the hopelessness of colonialism (in this case, of the West African, World War II era variety) perfectly well.

Scobie has an extreme case of Messiah Complex, doesn't he? He not only thinks he has to protect his wife and mistress from pain, he also has to protect God. Although I do not agree at all with Scobie's thinking, I do think the author did a great job in portraying him.

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  culminating in the assassination of his trusted coloured personal servant  . 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  thankfully, it didn't get anywhere near murder , 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.

This is one of Greene's serious novels. I won't lie, like Monsignor Quixote it has dated more than some of his other works - possibly due to their exploration of internal religious conflict with faith playing a heavy role, rather than just an ethical or spiritual debate without the exploration of Christianity. Nevertheless, The Heart of the Matter a powerful novel. It possesses the love elements along with the spiritual conflict of The End of the Affair, yet it also has the deeper historical layering of Greene's The Power and the Glory. I personally think it better than the former and not quite as strong as the latter.

In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie, an officer situated in an oppressive Africa, has sent his wife away for a holiday. In her absence he falls though for a younger widow, Helen. Scobie battles with his loyalty and faith, as he spirals into a life of so-called sin.

The Heart of the Matter is a tragedy in every sense of the word - and a bloody good one too.