Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork …
'He certainly loved no one else," she said.
'And you may be in the right of it there too,' Father Rank replied.


In between these bookend sentences lies the rest of The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene's 1948 novel, set in not-quite-darkest Africa during World War II. The novel became a best seller when it came out, and is high enough on the pantheon of notable fiction that it has its own 8-screen article on Wiki, from which comes …



the first edition cover


What do these sentences tell us about the story? Well, Wilson (one of the main characters) has pink knees. Why is this significant? Because the novel is set in British Sierra Leone – not a part of the world where one would have pink knees for long, if wearing the old colonial-style garb. Actually, Greene spells out what I've said here in the second paragraph: "His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from [the sea] into the port…" So Wilson has just arrived. Why? That will be revealed by Greene in his own good time.

And the sentences from the end? Well, only if I were to tell you who the woman Father Rank (not a main character at all) is speaking to (which I won't – though she is a very main character), and also tell you who the "he" is that she refers to (which I will – his name is Scobie, the character about whom the story is told), would you begin connecting the dots.



Let's back up (or go forward, whatever you like). I read this book almost a year ago now. I will assert, bravely, that I still remember most of the main thrust of the narrative. Almost anyone who reads this review could be astonished to learn (unless they don't care) that it was the first Greene novel I've ever read. So I was quite receptive to it, having a few others yet unread, and wanting to get started on his writing.

Greene is generally acknowledged as one of the top English fiction writers of the 20th century. He was very popular, and felt by many to have a certain "moral" depth not shared by most other popular writers. He was known as a writer of thrillers, which he didn’t dispute – but also of "Catholic novels". This he did dispute, claiming that he was someone who wrote novels who simply happened to be Catholic. (This of course neglects the fact that many of his greatest novels portrayed Catholic characters in situations and dilemmas which might seem most poignant to Catholic readers, even if they appealed to readers of other persuasions.)

The Catholic novels which to some critics form the core of his writing, are: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). In Wiki's Personal Life section on Greene, we find this. This points out some of the issues which for years must have dogged Greene as a Catholic writer.

I must say the story kept me reading. My book has loads of passages marked for quotation, one of which is this from very early.

In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.

But as the story developed I became unconvinced as to the main character. My own Catholic upbringing, beginning a personal era which ended long ago, yet seemed to tell me that something was amiss. Ultimately I must agree with George Orwell's judgement on the novel, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, and which is something of a spoiler, so be forewarned. Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is a mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is – that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain – he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.




The edition I have has an introduction by James Wood. I expect that I stopped reading this quickly, when I sensed that, for me, Wood was approaching spoiler territory usually I do read all material that comes before the narrative first. I will be reading Wood's intro soon, however, and may add a comment about it to this review.


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Reading 'Heart of the Matter' has left me with a sense of ambiguity about Scobie, the protagonist. The writing is fluid and gives a deep sense of both character and place. The struggles of Scobie are painful to read. They are also frustrating because Scobie brings everything down upon himself through bad decisions, decisions based on what he refers to as "responsibility'.

Graham Greene has created a character who seems to have taken upon himself responsibility for much of the pain in the world. Indeed, Scobie's greatest character trait is this sense of responsibility. It is at the root of how his does his job as a policeman, of his relationship with his wife, with his houseboy, with his mistress, and, finally, with his Catholic god. Scobie is a man who feels no love in the normal sense, only responsibility. I would suggest that this sense of responsibility might be better termed "compassion". Perhaps Greene is attempting to give us a man who is Christ-like, a man with compassion for all of humanity and ready to give his own life in order to spare others. He is prepared to give his life in order to spare even his god from watching him damn himself.

I have recently read John William's 'Stoner' and was taken by the similarity in many aspects of the story. Both protagonists were living in a loveless marriage, both felt that their careers were to some degree unsuccessful, both took lovers, but essentially, the characters of the two men couldn't have been much difference. Without taking it too far, I would suggest that Stoner was something of a Stoic, in the classical sense. We are faced with the good and the bad in life and we need to accept both equally. Love and happiness are possible. Loss and pain are inevitable.

Greene's Scobie, on the other hand, sees himself as the source of all of his own suffering because he causes pain in others and fails as a Catholic. But even his failure are brought about by his sense of responsibility to others. His failure as a policeman, by putting himself in debt to a known criminal, is brought about by his compassion for his wife, who needs money to go away. He takes a lover out of compassion for her as a young widow. Finally, he fails as a Catholic because he cannot get out of the world of sin in which he has entrapped himself. He cannot even confess his sins because he cannot break of his relationship with the young woman without hurting her.

I understand Scobie's compassion. Greene has done a wonderful job of creating a character with depth. I look upon Scobie, however, with some frustration because his Catholic rigidity does not allow him to have compassion for himself. Even his recognition that his god is forgiving does not allow him to escape. The character gives us an interesting look into the mind of the author in regard to Greene's own life as a Catholic, of sorts.

A good novel for those who want to consider what we do to ourselves and where our beliefs can take us. Highly recommended.

(Book 551 from 1001 books) - The Heart of The Matter, Graham Greene

The Heart of the Matter (1948) is a novel by English author Graham Greene. The book details a life-changing moral crisis for Henry Scobie.

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork...

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 develops the foundation of a story by turns 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.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هشتم ماه دسامبر سال1987میلادی

عنوان: جان کلام؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: حسین حجازی؛ تهران، بهاران، سال1365، در335ص موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده20م

عنوان: جان کلام؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: پرتو اشراق؛ تهران، نیلوفر، روز پانزدهم ماه دیماه سال1383، در328ص شابک9789644482176؛

کتاب «جان کلام»‌ نوشته «گراهام گرین» رمان‌نویس، نمایشنامه‌ نویس، و منتقد ادبی «بریتانیا» است؛ ایشان یکی از پرکارترین نویسندگان سده ی بیستم میلادی بوده اند؛ که علاوه بر نویسندگی، در رویدادهای مهم آن سالها نیز، نقش داشته؛ و شاهد تحولات دوران مدرن بوده اند؛ در این کتاب قهرمان اصلی داستان، یک مرد است؛ پس زمینه ی داستان، سواحل غربی «آفریقا»، در زمان جنگ جهانی دوم است، و قهرمان داستان، یک سرگرد پلیس و معاون کمیسر شهر، به نام سرگرد «اسکوبی» است؛ که در دنیای پر از شایعه ی «آفریقایی»، در میان سفید‌پوستان، عرب‌ها، هندی‌ها، و آفریقائی‌های سیاه پوست، زندگی می‌کند؛ در‌‌ همان نخستین اوراق داستان، خوانشگر باخبر می‌شود، که وی‌ مردی درستکار است، که به رغم تمام قابلیت‌هایش به عنوان جانشین برای کمیسر پلیس، در نظر گرفته نشده است، و قرار است جانشینی جوان‌تر از او، این پست را به دست بگیرد؛ هر چند این خبر، باعث مأیوس شدن همسرش می‌شود، اما «اسکوبی» خود، اهمیت اندکی به این مسئله می‌دهد؛ او عاشق شغل، و سرزمینی که در آن زندگی‌ می‌کند، است؛ کتاب «جان کلام گرین» به مطامع بشری اشاره دارند، که حد و مرزی نمی‌شناسد؛

نقل از آغاز متن: («ویلسون» در بالکن «هتل بدفورد» نشست؛ زانوهای بی مو، و گلگونش را، به زور میان نرده ها جای داد؛ یکشنبه بود، و زنگ کلیسا، مردم را به دعای صبحگاهی فرا میخواند؛ آنسوی خیابان باند، پشت پنجره های دبیرستان، دخترهای سیاهپوست، با لباس ورزشی آبی سیر، نشسته بودند، و به کار تمام نشدنی فرزدن موهای تاب خورده ی خود مشغول بودند، ویلسون دستی به سبیل تازه دمیده اش کشید، و در انتظار آوردن جین و لیمویش به رویا فرو رفت؛ نشسته بود، رو به خیابان باند و چشم به سوی دریا داشت؛ رنگ زردش نشان میداد، که اخیرا از سفر دریایی، قدم به خشکی نهاده، و اشتیاقی هم به دیدن دختران روبرو ندارد؛ مثل عقربه کند هواسنجی شده بود، که هنوز هم با وجود توفان، هوای خوب و مساعد را، نشان میدهد؛ آن پایین، کارمندان سیاه، که با زنانشان در لباسهای روشن، به رنگ آبی و قرمز، به کلیسا میرفتند، هیچ احساسی در «ویلسون» برنمیانگیختند؛ در بالکن تنها بود، سوای «هندی» ریشوی عمامه به سری که قبلاً سعی کرده بود، طالعش را بگوید: آن روز بخت، با سفیدها یار نبود؛ در آنوقت روز، آنها کنار ساحلی، در پنج مایلی آنجا بودند؛ اما «ویلسون» اتومبیل نداشت؛ تقریبا به طور تحمل ناپذیری، احساس تنهایی میکرد؛ از هر طرف ساختمان مدرسه، سقفهای حلبی، به جانب دریا شیب داشت، و آهن موجدار بالای سرش، وقتی لاشخوری روی آن فرود میآمد، دَرَنگ دَرَنگ صدا میکرد)»؛ پایان نقل؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 23/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 16/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

I love Greene. What a sad, lovely, desperate novel. It bites like only love and life can.

When you get right down to the heart of the matter, the heart is difficult to know and even more difficult to control. A good man can do bad things, and a bad man can get away with murder. Henry Scobie is a good man, in fact a rarer thing, a good policeman, who finds himself trapped in a situation in which there is no way out that won’t damage someone. Henry Scobie is not a man who is comfortable with damaging someone else to save himself. In fact, Greene seems to think it is ironically his very goodness that dooms him.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself and impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Henry carries this capacity like a millstone. He finds himself damned for being human, for being frail, and he comes to believe that he has failed the ultimate test. Like Abraham with Isaac, he has been asked to put his love for God above his love for the human beings he sees as being in his care, and he finds himself incapable of doing so.

He seems to feel, as well, that the suffering is his fate, unavoidable as breathing.

He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.

Graham Greene has written a staggering treatise on what it is to be human. He has shown how choices can collapse around a man like dominos and carry him down a road he never thought to travel. I love the way he looks at the human heart and sees what is good and kind and valiant; and what is cruel and evil and cowardly. I found so many of these characters so believably self-serving, so consummately unaware of any struggle that was not their own, so cruel in the demands they made in the guise of love, that I winced at the irony of Henry doing so much to spare their feelings and protect their futures.

There is also Greene’s tussle with religion. Scobie is a Catholic and he tortures himself over his beliefs and the surety that he will be punished forever if he fails to follow the religious dictates. Greene appears to think the Church might have it wrong, that what is in the heart might be what really matters, and therein lies whatever hope there might be for the Scobies of the world.

A nice man who is a people pleaser marries a manipulative, cunning woman. He thinks of others before himself and God AND we ask why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Our conscience sometimes is the biggest con.

گراهام گرین تو این رمان از پیچیدگی روان انسانی و و گیر افتادن بین تعاریف عشق ، مسئولیت و دلسوزی صحبت میکنه. چیزی که بیشتر از همه منو جذب خودش کرد این حقیقتی بود که در ضمن کتاب بیان میشد:" این که هیچکس، دیگری رو اونطور که واقعا هست، درک و شناسایی نمیکنه". گرین در این کتاب با عنوان کردن قالبهای مذهبیِ شخصیتِ اصلی و گیر افتادن او در این شک و یقین، خواننده هایی مثل من رو که گرفتار قالبهای مذهب اند رو با خودش همراه میکنه.
کتاب خوبی بود برای طرفداران گرین، ولی به طور کلی برای اینکه از گرین کتاب بخونید پیشنهادِ اولِ خوبی نیست.

“If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.”

Published in 1948, this book is a psychological character study of Henry Scobie, a British police official living with his wife in Sierra Leone in 1942. He has recently been passed over for promotion. His wife is unhappy. He borrows money from a corrupt individual to send her to South Africa, setting off a spiral of poor choices. He meets a young widow who reminds him of his deceased daughter. “He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.”

Greene excels at describing flawed individuals and their struggles. He puts the reader into Scobie’s mind. Scobie, a Catholic, is consumed by guilt for his choices, though he cannot seem to extract himself from his dilemma. He uses the excuse that he is acting out of love, but the reader will discern that love is not the source. This book portrays the futility of trying to predict what will happen as a result of our actions.

This book is a classic "colonial novel." We are immediately immersed in the British colonial tropics - an unnamed British colony in West Africa during World War II. Cockroaches, rats and diseases abound. The British colony shares a border with a Vichy French (German-allied) colonial country so there is much intrigue about industrial diamond smuggling and the sinking of ships off the coast. This capital city is a melting pot with Africans and British of course (and the n-word is frequently tossed around by the latter over gin), Germans, and Syrian merchants, some of whom are Muslim and some Catholic.

Our protagonist is the chief of police. A man devoted to duty, he manages to create a totally loveless, duty-bound relationship with both his wife and mistress. He grows to dread spending time with either one. We watch his gradual and painful descent from stellar civil servant into evil.

The Heart of the Matter is a very "Catholic" novel. Unlike Brideshead Revisited, also considered a Catholic novel, the discussions of Catholicism aren't incidental to the plot and characters, but very much in the fore. There are discussions of points of Catholic theology with priests, the protagonist's wife and mistress, and religious discussions at cocktail parties as well as the debates that go on in the police chief's mind. But these aren't prolonged discussions; the plot moves and it's quite a fascinating book, suspenseful to the (bitter) end.

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

That seems to be key theme of book, there is no knowing what goes on in a heart and no tying it down with rules of morality. Scobie is a good guy by most accounts whose conscience is troubled by his catholic beliefs. It is almost invariably the good people that feel guilt which proves it is stupid. But what's amazing is that his wife seemed to not know him at all in the end. It is a fact that despite his highly objective (to the point of being boring) and honest diary keeping habit and his regular confessions, no one in the end seem to really know him.

n  
A priest only knows the unimportant things.’

‘Unimportant?’

‘Oh, I mean the sins,’ he said impatiently. ‘A man doesn’t come to us and confess his virtues.’
n

Thus his  suicide  shocked everyone. And he probably won't have killed himself if it wasn't for catholic bug.

n  
A sick man’s death means to them only a short suffering - everybody has to die. We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
n

And this quote is just wow:

n  
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 painful affection, loyalty, pity ... n

Sıradan bir melodram, öyküsüyle, kurgusuyla, diliyle. Tek ilginç yanı 2. Dünya Savaşı sırasında o zaman İngiltere’nin sömürgesi olan Sierra Leone’de geçmiş olması, sömürge havasını yansıtmış olması. Gerçi yerel motifler ve yaşam pek yer almamış.
Bir de erken yaşta Protestanlıktan Katolikliğe geçen yazarın sanki bu kararını sorgular gibi din ve tanrı hakkında, sevgi ve bilinmezlik arasına sıkışıp kalması kitabın ilginç yönü diyebilirim.

Greene knew love. Her name was Vivian who gave "the trees shade, the flowers scent and the sun a gold it never had before." On their wedding day he wrote, "all the water in the world will be turned into wine." What he didn't count on after was the hangover.

The Heart of the Matter is painful as one. Yet, I felt no regret for reading it again. The first time I did, I was very young and newly married. I thought it was about an affair. Today, I turn the pages and see a marriage, born of love, still full of passion, yet broken irreparably.

What inspiration Greene's own marriage gave to this novel matters less than the steadiness of his hand as he wrote it. I'm reminded with its tropical setting of my own experience trying to write a letter one summer in Japan. The ink spread in the heat on the paper. Words filled like eyes with tears. Only read The Heart of the Matter if you're feeling strong.