scotinprogress

I’ve started re-reading Graham Greene. I read his books many years ago in my teens and early twenties along with most of the other books considered classics.

I’ve begun with The Heart of the Matter. I doubt I got much out of it as a young woman, because the only thing I remembered was that it was set in a hot place, so hot that the protagonist couldn’t touch his wife at night without sweat running between them. I understood that this was a symbol of the problems in their marriage, but I didn’t remember or understand much more.

I’ve really enjoyed rediscovering Graham Greene, and can’t think of any modern writer who can match his prose for creating setting and atmosphere in a few sentences. I’ll try to say a few things about the novel without too many spoilers.

A love square

The main character, Scobie, is a respected policeman serving in the British colonial service in Sierra Leone. The second world war is on, making it difficult or impossible for the colonial administrators to take their annual leave. In the hot climate and small colony, gossip breeds, tempers fray, men become corrupt. Sometimes people even go mad.

Scobie, however, keeps well out of it. He’s been there fifteen years and has grown to love the place and the indigenous people. All he wants is to do his work in peace. However, other people stand in his way. One is his wife who is unhappy and desperately wants to get away for a while. In trying to make his wife happy, Scobie commits his first mistake. He accepts a loan from a corrupt businessman to pay for an extended holiday for his wife.

Scobie finds himself in a love triangle, or perhaps it’s a love square. He has made promises to three people: his wife, his mistress and God. He loves all three of them in different ways. However, his promises are incompatible. Whatever he does, he’s going to let one of them down.

Can God cope with disappointment?

God, Scobie reasons, can cope with disappointment better than a mortal. He can do without Scobie’s love, and the policeman decides on a course of action which, he believes, will keep his mistress and his wife happy, even if it cuts him off from God.

The prose is spare, yet in a few deft words, Graham Greene paints vivid pictures of the colonial town and the heat. Each scene tightens the noose around Scobie’s neck as he becomes more morally compromised.

Scobie is a Catholic, a convert in some ways lukewarm and going through the motions of keeping the rules. However, he has great respect for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He agonises over whether to take communion when he believes himself to be in a place of mortal sin.

Did Scobie love God?

Scobie is a flawed character, someone who made what seemed at first to be small mistakes. Instead of getting everything out into the open, he covers them up and falls deeper into error.

The novel poses questions about rules versus God’s mercy which are relevant to all of us since we all make mistakes and can identify to some extent with Scobie.

I felt that Scobie, despite his choices, was a man who loved God. Some of the passages were so beautiful that I felt myself open out to deeper love of God. In the end, isn’t that what great literature is meant to do, open our hearts a little more?