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Book Circle Reads 35

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

My Review: An excellent book. Simply magnificent writing, as always, but more than that the story is perfectly paced (a thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg The Power and the Glory) and deeply emotional (another thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg Travels With My Aunt).

Greene himself didn't like the book, which was a species of roman à clef. I suspect, though I don't have proof, that he was simply uncomfortable at how much of his inner life he revealed in the book. Scobie's infidelity and his fraught relationship with the wife he's saddled with must have been bad reading for Mrs. Greene. But the essential conflict of the book is man versus church, the giant looming monster of judgment and hatred that is Catholicism. Greene's convert's zeal for the idiotic strictures, rules, and overarching dumb "philosophy" of the religion are tested here, and ultimately upheld, though the price of the struggle and the upholding aren't scanted in the text.

Stories require conflicts to make them interesting, and the essential question an author must address is "what's at stake here?" The more intense and vivid the answer to that question is, the more of an impact the story is able to make. Greene was fond of the story he tells here, that of an individual against his individuality. He told and retold the story. The state, the colonial power whose interests Scobie/Greene serves, is revealed in the text to be an uncaring and ungrateful master; the rules of the state are broken with remarkably few qualms when the stakes get high enough. It is the monolith of the oppressive church, admonishing Scobie of his "moral" failings and withholding "absolution of his sins", that he is in full rebellion against...and in the end it is the church that causes all parties the most trouble and pain.

Greene remained a more-or-less believing Catholic. I read this book and was stumped as to why. The vileness of the hierarchy was so clear to me, I couldn't imagine why anyone would read it and not drop christianity on the spot. But no matter one's stance on the religion herein portrayed, there's no denying the power of the tension between authority and self in creating an engaging and passionate story. A must-read.

WOW! I am sold on Greene!

If you are looking for a book that will push you to think, this is for you. If you are looking for a novel of psychological, philosophical or religious import, this is the novel for you too. It has also extremely strong character portrayal. I am not religious, and it opened up for me how those who do have faith reason. It showed me how a person of the Roman Catholic faith might think and might struggle with their beliefs. Pay attention to the word struggle. How one worships God is not dealt with in a rote manner. We observe how some good, pious individuals struggle with their beliefs every single day. Ethics is the central focus of the book. Almost every single sentence give readers food for thought. There are no ready answers provided here. Lines are to be contemplated and savored. Below follow lines from the text:

“Lies are for the young.”

“He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.”

“Why do you always tell me the truth? We don’t want it all the time.”

“Nobody can forgive the uncontrite.”

“I don’t know how I have lost the trick of trust.”

“No man can guarantee love forever.”

“So much of life was the pushing off of unhappiness for another time.”

“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.”

I like how Greene puts together his words; I like his metaphors and similes:

“The houses were as white as bones in the moonlight.”

“The phrases went to and fro like shuttlecocks.”

Let’s consider the plot. It would not be wrong to state that the story revolves around diamond smuggling. Smuggled industrial diamonds had to be prevented from reaching Portugal, Germany and Vichy France. The events of the story play out during the Second World War. The setting is an unnamed British colony in West Africa. Greene lived at this time in Sierra Leone. He emphasizes in a prologue that what we have before us is fiction, but needless to say, his own experiences influence his novel. The description of the climate as well as the pervading mood of the time and place can be viewed as accurate. Greene writes of what he has himself experienced and intimately knows. This shows.

As one reads, one asks, not if it is possible to love two at the same time but instead how this might play out in one’s life. Love may in some cases arise from pity. Being in love with two is not a whirlwind of fun. It is a nightmare leading to deception and lies. The scenario Greene draws is moving, captivating and impossible to put down. You will think about and analyze the consequences of adultery and love on a personal level.

Elisabeth Kessler reads the recording of Greene’s novel. She reads at a slow, calm pace. This allows the listener time to think carefully and ponder Greene’s words. At the start, I wasn’t enthused by Kessler’s narration. By the end I was. She allows the listener to communicate directly with Greene rather than putting herself in between. This novel is not to be zipped through quickly. As I have shown, it is chockfull of lines to be savored and thought upon. Kessler’s narration I have given four stars. The novel is read as it should be read!

So far, this is my favorite by Greene!

***************************

*The Heart of the Matter 5 stars
*The Quiet American 4 stars
*The Human Factor 4 stars
*The End of the Affair 2 stars
*Travels with My Aunt 2 stars

*The Third Man & The Fallen Idol TBR

“The Heart of the Matter” zeroes in on mean gossip at the club and the loneliness of the British inhabitants in a West African colony based on Sierra Leone. The protagonist Scobie is a policeman and the one white character who gets on with the locals. The Africans aren't developed beyond a shadowy presence of saying “yes sah” or, in the case of women, stirring forbidden lust as they walk by. Africa is but a backdrop that allows the British to be alienated and inward-looking. Their small, closed society is claustrophobic, and when the rainy season comes this feeling is intensified.

Scobie’s wife Louise is a burden, she is falling apart in Africa but he wants to stay. He risks his reputation as a straight-shooting cop and borrows money from a Syrian businessman so he can send her to South Africa. While she is away, he starts an affair with a younger woman, Helen, a survivor of forty days in a lifeboat after a German submarine sunk her ship. Scobie’s affection for Helen is based on pity. The novel is set during the Second World War, but the war feels far away in West Africa.

Wilson, a newcomer to the colony, falls in love with Louise before she leaves and won't let Scobie get away with his behaviour. Never mind Wilson, Scobie’s Catholic faith won’t let him tolerate his own actions. Yusef, the Syrian he borrowed money from wants part of his soul too. There is a subplot about the Muslim Yusef and his Christian Syrian rival accusing each other of smuggling diamonds. The sleazy Yusef claims he wants Scobie's friendship but just ends up manipulating him.

The brilliance of this novel is in the relationship between two Brits in the colonial service: Scobie's enemy Wilson and the pitiable Harris. They bond over a game involving killing cockroaches, and then, as flatmates in a nipper hut, find out they went to the same public school back in England. They won’t admit their alienation began there. Both still wish for belonging – Wilson publishes a poem in the school magazine, and Harris wants to send a letter to tell the old boys of his whereabouts, which they have requested. However, in his heart, Harris knows they just want to hit him up for a donation.

Ali, Scobie’s boy (servant) is important in the plot but he is faintly sketched. Anthony Burgess would have given Ali a lot of comic idiosyncrasies and included scenes of him talking to other Africans about the Europeans. Burgess’s characterisations of locals would be far from politically correct by today’s standards, but through comic portrayals, he would have shown interest in them. Greene's Yusef can’t read or write but speaks perfect English. Burgess would have attempted a more realistic speech pattern and thrown in the odd word of Arabic. The Heart of the Matter can be compared to Burgess’s “Devil of the State”, a novel influenced by Greene and dedicated to him. Greene didn’t rate it though. Burgess’s fictional Dunia in East Africa (based on Brunei, see my review  Devil of a State: A Novel) is more alive than Greene’s West Africa. But Burgess doesn’t have much of a plot in his vivid portrayal of a colony on the verge of independence. Local politics don’t interest Greene but The Heart of the Matter is tightly written and gripping for the first 150 pages. Then he goes deep into Scobie’s agony of guilt. I’m interested in Catholic themes of sin, guilt and redemption, but Greene takes an indulgently long time over the fall here. This was my first work by Greene in a decade. I enjoyed it without getting bowled over. Originally gave it three stars - it needs four.

F.E. Beyer is the author of Buenos Aires Triad

One of my Goodreads groups is about to do a common read of another novel by Greene. That prompted me to finally write a review of this one, the only example of his long fiction that I've read, after a lapse of 18 years. (As a high school student, I also read one of his short stories, but it proved to be largely forgettable.) There are inevitably details about the book that I've forgotten, but I actually remember the bulk of it, and my reactions to it as I read, pretty well (and checked it out from the college library again so as to have the text on hand to refer to).

Greene (1904-1991) was one of the major figures of his day in British literature, "canonized" in the earlier part of the century by a critical establishment that wasn't yet so intolerant of his popularity with ordinary readers and of his Roman Catholic affiliation as it would become in the later decades. I actually read this novel as part of my preparation for teaching British literature when we were homeschooling our girls, though I have to admit that it doesn't give me enough basis to judge his overall merit as a writer for myself. As for this book itself, however, I wasn't greatly taken with it. It held my attention consistently, and a lot of the writing is good, with interesting detail and skillful observations of character and social processes. But I didn't personally find anything deeper in it. (Some of my Goodreads friends apparently did; only a half dozen or so have read it, but of those, four gave it four or five stars. But I have to make my own call, and I'm not able to be that positive.) I'd originally have said that I "liked" it; but on reflection, I found it hard to justify even that favorable assessment, beyond what I wrote above. It's also an extremely difficult novel to discuss without resorting to spoilers; so I'll use spoiler tags now to explain the gist of the plot. We're dealing with a Roman Catholic protagonist who's married, but who embarks on an adulterous affair with a woman he meets early in the novel. Unable to deal with the emotional consequences of this betrayal, lacking the resolve to either break off the affair or leave his wife, and wracked by the thought that he's in mortal sin, he ultimately kills himself with what he tries to make appear to be an accidental overdose of medication.

I never really was able to get inside the protagonist's head enough to understand him or any of his major actions, even though he's the viewpoint character. Much of his behavior, in fact, appeared to be out of character, insofar as the author enables us to understand the character. Likewise, I never felt the relationship of the "lovers" here to be any kind of convincing great love in the first place. This is conventionally viewed as one of Greene's "Catholic novels," and we are treated to a lot of outward trappings of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and much talk about it. But for a "Catholic novel," Catholicism plays very little positive role here; its main function appears to be the creation of guilt, without offering any remedy for it. There's no message (or very little) of God's forgiving grace, which is as much at the heart of Catholic as it is of Protestant theology. (IMO, this reflects the fact that Greene's relationship with the Church was in reality ambivalent; he was a lifelong womanizer who cheated on both his wife and his mistress, and in his later years often referred to himself as a "Catholic agnostic" or even a "Catholic atheist.") In general, it's a tragic and depressing read, and it's not something you come away from with any sense of uplift or triumph of the human spirit despite adversity.

Stylistically, Greene was a Realist; and he profited here by the adage, "Write what you know." During World War II (which took place not too long before this book was written) he served as a British intelligence agent in Sierra Leone; and that experience is the direct background of the setting here, an unnamed British West African colony during World War II. The character Wilson is also a British spy, though I'd guess that Scobie is the character more closely patterned on the author himself (his first name is Henry, which was also Greene's little used first name --Graham was his middle name). But the Africa that's evoked is a bleak and prosaic one, focused on the implanted urban world of the expatriate British. We don't get any sense of the majesty and mystery of the continent, just images of rusting lorries, vultures, pollution, omnipresent stifling heat, and boredom so stultifying that it drives two Englishmen to compete in fly-killing, and to take their scores seriously enough for a cheating accusation. Nor do black Africans play much active role here; they're just subordinates viewed as part of the furniture, and not infrequently designated by the n-word. (That reflects common British speech in the day, not necessarily Greene's own attitude.)

If a reader wants to be "educated" in the literature treated as canonical in the 20th-century, Greene is a writer he/she needs to be exposed to. He's not the first author I read with that goal in mind, whether to "educate" myself or prepare to teach others; and unlike some books by others, I actually finished this one. For that purpose, I'd guess this novel is probably as good a choice as any other in his body of work. But it never inspired me to read any more of his work; and but for the majority of a group voting for one as a common read, I wouldn't be planning to read another of his novels now.

El comandante de policía Henry Scobie y su mujer Louise viven desde hace años junto a otros funcionarios británicos en una remota colonia de África . Un entorno asfixiante que todos están deseando abandonar, especialmente Louise. Henry, por su parte , es un hombre íntegro que acepta estoicamente su situación y su matrimonio con una mujer por la que siente compasión más que cariño y a la que, por encima de todo, procura hacer feliz. Pero con la llegada de una inesperada visitante , los firmes principios de Henry se verán puestos a prueba.
Publicada en 1948 e inspirada en la experiencia del propio autor en Sierra Leona dura te la guerra , está novela se convirtió rápidamente en un best seller y está considerada como una de sus mejores obras. El revés de la trama ahonda en los temas predilectos de Greene : los claroscuros de la naturaleza humana, la traición a los demás y a uno mismo, el fracaso, la fé , el sacrificio y el amor llevado hasta sus últimas consecuencias. Sin duda una novela inolvidable.

*SPOILERS ALERT*

A sad sad novel. I liked it even though I'm not a catholic. A lot of the catholic guilt stuff went straight over my head. I am a philistine guy who has not read the bible and knows next to nothing about Christianity. But even then, there was a lot to appreciate in the novel.

It is set in a multicultural African colony, controlled and policed by the British. Scobie is an extremely moral but broke policeman with a demanding wife Louise. He is getting old and it looks like he will not be made commissioner. It is wartime and Scobie is out to catch diamond smugglers. Temptations abound. A Syrian Muslim businessman who might be involved with diamond smuggling tries to befriend Scobie. When his wife, who is sick of living in the African colony asks for money to move to South Africa, Scobie bends over for the Syrian. But before that he tries to push his wife into the hands of an impotent and self-repressed accountant named Wilson. It only creates a deep hatred in Wilson for Scobie after Louise rejects him. Louise leaves for South Africa. Scobie has an affair with a woman who is shipwrecked and orphaned. But then Louise informs him that she is coming back. Scobie struggles with multiple moral dilemmas. And Wilson is spying on him. The only respite in this mosquito and rat infested land is the copious amounts of pink gins and whiskeys that everyone's drinking down.

The novel is divided into into three books. I found the first book (which ends with Louise leaving for South Africa) to be very sad and compelling. Scobie's feelings of inadequacy and gradual decline and the exotic rainy landscapes are vividly evoked with intensely emotional prose filled with quotable lines and almost perfect pacing. Greene knows how to tear into the hearts of his characters and reveal their deepest fears and emotions. The two other books failed to move me as much as the first book. This is almost entirely due to those two parts being awash with catholic guilt and filled with long dreary conversations between these conflicted characters.

Like in The End of the Affair and The Comedians, there is a complicated and emotionally charged love quadrangle. But unlike those books, the main character in Heart of the Matter is the cuckold. Greene was obviously interested in matters of fidelity and betrayal from a religious point of view. And maybe he was a bit of a perv. Or why would he have these entangled and overlapping love triangles and quadrangles in every single book?

And this bit when Scobie asks the Syrian whether his Prophet does not forbid beer and whiskey. This is the Syrian's reply: "The Prophet had no experience with bottled beer or whiskey, Major Scobie. We have to interpret his words in the modern light". I don't know what to make of this.

As someone who is not very devout, I could not really identify with Scobie's spiritual torment. But I could identify with his real life problems and uncertainties. And the novel also worked as a bit of a thriller. But those are the superficial things. And those are the only things that I could really appreciate. Maybe I should stick to crime fiction and horror.

África, por altura da II G.G. Mundial.
Numa colónia inglesa, sem nome atribuído, Henry Scobie , o sub-comissário de Polícia, procura manter a compostura- interior e exterior - não obstante o clima húmido e temperamental, os ratos, baratas e outros bichos, o paludismo e outras febres. Também há contrabando, confrontos entre nativos que Scobie tem que resolver, amizades dissimuladas entre os ingleses e muitas conversas sussurradas entre eles.
" Esta terra não é para ti."- diz Henry à sua mulher Louise. É que, mesmo com muito gin , whisky ou quinino, viver mais um dia num ambiente assim significa voltar a pôr à prova a força mental, moral, a fé e as convicções. O nó a que o título se refere é moral, é a "consciência das responsabilidades". Teria sido interessante ter registado todas as máximas que norteiam a existência de Henry para páginas mais tarde as confrontar com os seus atos. Quanto ao problema ele é óbvio para o leitor logo que surge. No entanto, Greene , no final, ainda tem algo a esclarecer ao leitor sobre esse assunto.

“If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” –Graham Greene

I was raised, as they say “in the church,” and even taught English in parochial (religious) schools for several years, as faith drained from me, inch by inch, year by year. I think of myself as an agnostic now, though I sometimes do pray, just in case, I say jokingly. Though I am not and never have been a Roman Catholic, I am quite familiar with the intricacies of Catholic theology. I was once a doubt-driven Christian. I loved reading the anguished novels of Coetzee, Camus, Dostoevsky and yes, Greene, especially the three central “Catholic” ones that some of have told me emerged out of his own life and moral struggles. Greene was once asked about what he thought was the fate of the three central male characters in The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory, and he said he thought Scobie of Heart of the Matter might be in Hell, Maurice in End of the Affair might be in Heaven, and the whiskey priest of Power and the Glory was in purgatory. All three books deal with infidelity, or adultery, which is something Greene himself, a lifelongRoman Catholic, had some painful experience with.

Scobie is a British intelligence officer in a colony in British West Africa during World War II. He is married to Louise, and together they had a daughter, Catherine, who died many years ago. Both of the Scobies are observant Catholics. Louise, approaching fifty, doesn’t want to live there anymore, and so he borrows some money to send her away indefinitely. While she is gone Scobie, who has fallen out of love with Louise, and loves no one anymore, not even himself, meets a young refugee woman, Helen, who reminds him of his daughter. He knows she has suffered deeply; he pities her and wants to take responsibility for her, and out of his own anguish and what might just be love, he begins an affair with her.

When his wife returns abruptly. Scobie realizes he can leave neither woman, as he knows he will then cause them pain. He wants Louise to be happy, he wants Helen to be happy, and he mainly just wants peace and solitude. He finds in the process that he does love Louise, and Helen, and God. But when Louise encourages him to go to confession, and take communion with him, he realizes he can’t confess something he doesn’t regret, even if he knows it is mortal sin. That’s the heart of the story, what brings Scobie to greater depths of despair, an unforgivable sin in itself.

Some quotations that lay out Scobie’s dark psychological/spiritual state:

“It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?”

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”

Later, in his struggle with what to do about his dilemma, he talks to Father Rank, and confesses, without making a commitment to change, which is no confession at all, they both know. Later on, Father Rank says to Louise:

"I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."

Greene remained a Catholic until the end, but he never stopped wrestling with the church even as he engaged in what he admitted was sinful behavior, hurtful to his wife and family. Scobie, like Greene, is no saint. He’s a sinner, deeply flawed, struggling as most humans do in ways we come to sympathize with—if not admire-- him for.

The Heart of the Matter was ranked #40 in the list of greatest English-language novels of all time, and from my rereading of it, it’s a deservedly high rating. Greene himself didn’t like the book as much as his critics did, nor as much as his many followers. It’s heavy, even grimly agonizing in places, but it deals with issues of love and morality, betrayal and corruption brilliantly and moving. I actually think The Power and the Glory is even better, but in these books we know Greene is unflinchingly examining the human heart in all its complexities.

”Când ești tânăr îți închipui că dragostea presupune și înțelegere, dar odată cu vârsta pricepi că nicio ființă omenească n-o poate înțelege pe alta. Dragostea înseamnă și dorința de a înțelege, dar curând eșecul constant omoară dorința și dragostea moare și ea probabil, sau se preschimbă în această afecțiune istovitoare, în realitate, compasiune… ”

”Cu toții suntem împăcați cu ideea morții: cu viața nu prea ne împăcăm.”

„Nu frumusețea e cea pe care o iubim, cugetă el, ci eșecul – eșecul tentativelor de a rămâne veșnic tânăr, eșecul nervilor, eșecul trupului. Frumusețea e ca succesul: nu poate fi iubită mult timp.”

”Biserica le știe pe toate. Dar nu știe ce se petrece nici măcar în inima unui singur om.”

I hate my job. I hate my life. I hate my wife. I hate my mistress. I love God but hate him for making me Catholic. I hate my servant. I hate the guy blackmailing me. I hate the guy who's spying on me and is in love with my wife. I hate everyone around me. I hate that I might be going to Hell.

Well, I hate this book. I hate the story. I hate the characters. I hate the main characters name. I hate the setting. I hate the Catholic guilt that rears its useless head every third page. I hate the whiny wife. I hate the war time paranoia. I hate the beginning the middle and the end. I hate the "prose" and I really hate that I didn't throw this book in the trash when the notion hit me at page 30.

I might hate Graham Greene but I don't think I can know that until I read another book by him.

And that might be the thing I hate most of all.

باوجودیکه کتاب خوب نوشته شده اما باز واسم خسته کننده بود.. دلم نمی خواد صدای فریادهای وحشتناک روح هیچ انسانی رو بشنوم!!.. فعلا که لبریزم.. طاقت تحمل زندگی ملالت بار دیگران رو ندارم!! میخونم تا یاد بگیرم بتونم شور زندگی رو به لحظه های خودم برگردونم و حفظش کنم

این دعاهایی که ما می کنیم که حساب نیست، نه؟
در حال حاضر ممکن است، اما وقتی آن لحظه مرحمت فرا برسد دعاهای ما بر می خیزند، و مثل فوج پرندگان به پرواز در می آیند

معصومیت اگر نخواهد روح آدم ها را بکشد باید در جوانی بمیرد

وقتی اسکوبی جوان بود فکر می کرد عشق و تفاهم با هم ارتباط دارند. ولی پس از سال ها دریافته بود که افراد بشر با یکدیگر تفاهم ندارند- عشق آرزوی رسیدن به تفاهم بود

گرچه آن صدای درونی دیگر سخن نمی گفت اما گویی انگشتانش را دراز کرده بود و بی صدا پیام می فرستاد. سعی می کرد او را نزد خود نگه دارد

یک آدم خوشبخت به من نشان بده تا من هم به تو غرور، خودپسندی، شرارت و جهل مطلق را نشان دهم

نمی دونم ویراستار انتشارات نیلوفر چش شده بود چون خیلی از نقطه ها و ویرگول ها سرجاشون نبودن!! چاپ دوم که من خوندم اینطوری بود