Every time I read Graham Greene, I vow to read more Graham Greene. He digs so utterly, completely into the souls of his characters--really, you know them better than most of the real people in your life. Major Scobie is no exception. In fact, everything about this man is laid bare.

Scobie is a good man. He is upstanding and moral in a place (British colonial West Africa), time (WWII), and profession (the police) that values deception, injustice, and corruption. The petty colonial British society in the unnamed West African country where he is stationed finds it disagreeable that he has nothing to hide, so they make up scandals to pin on him. Another reviewer mentioned the unsympathetic and shallow portrayals of the women in Scobie's life; they are that way because the whole society is that way. If one looks at the other important male characters around Scobie, one finds that they are equally shallow and unsympathetic. It's not misogyny that drives Greene's portrayals; it's disgust for upper-middle-class colonial British society (see Forster's A Passage to India for another take on that). The point is that Scobie is different than they are.

But back to Scobie himself. He is a Catholic who truly believes in God, suffering, and redemption. He won't take communion in a state of sin, but he also won't confess when he knows he has no intention of quitting his sin and feels no remorse. There is a scene towards the end, when his wife practically begs him to go to Mass--and communion--with her, and he finally agrees. The wrenching torment he feels at receiving the Host in his disgraced state is as harrowing and traumatic as a battle scene would play out in any other writer's work. And after he's taken it, he feels as bereft as any soldier who's lost a limb would. My heart actually beat faster, and I felt a sucking horror on reading it (maybe that's just because I'm Catholic, though--hehe).

Scobie is moral in the the traditional societal sense--but he also feels an irresistible responsibility towards others. The turning point for him is when his wife insists she must get away to South Africa--for her sake, for his sake--to give him some peace, she says. He can't afford to send her, but he knows how much she wants it, so to make her happy, he gets a loan from a disreputable businessman. The loan is on the level, but it leads to other favors being asked, and hence to corruption for Scobie. Then comes another temptation in the form of a fellow human who is weak, desperate, and alone. Again Scobie must (or feels he must) be the savior, and becomes the lover of a young widowed shipwreck victim. It wasn't what he intended, but intense friendship, especially when pity or gratitude is a component, does at times turn passionate, even without the consent of the parties involved.

In the end, Scobie is so conflicted and unable to see a way to making everyone happy--everyone he cares about, anyway--that he decides the only solution is to remove himself from their lives. And he does so; but in doing so, he condemns himself to eternal damnation, at least in his mind. He makes this ultimate sacrifice of his own salvation because of his love, pity, mercy--whatever you want to call it--for those who are petty, misunderstanding, undeserving, and unworthy.

This is true tragedy: the hero has a tragic flaw, that which is within himself, that leads him to his own demise. It was very affecting. Bravo, once again, to Graham Greene.

Introduction, by James Wood

--The Heart of the Matter

I read this- the bulk of this- in one sitting.

I don't know what it is, other than remnants of Catholic guilt which moves me still even as I grew up American Protestant rather than Greene's devoutly tormented English Catholicism but this book really caught fire for me about a hundred pages from the end. The bells are ringing, Scobie's freaking out, and I'm losing my shit.

I actually read- no joke- about 20 pages of the last act of the thing aloud in a superpompous British accent in order to laugh off my intimations of impending doom.

Recommended activity for anyone, especially when things internal and external get too fucked up.

Greene writes with this smooth narrative power that I am spellbound by everytime I find it.

Listen:

"Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had gathered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. (!)

Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. (!!)

No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odor of human meanness and injustice- it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke." (!!!)

There's a word for this kind of thing.

And that word is.......writing....