Rating: 
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: A one-sentence summation of "The Heart of the Matter" does not convey this masterpiece's power and appeal. Why? Basically, this tells the story of a lonely unselfish man with great integrity who finds love in adultery and then is overwhelmed by its guilty fallout. Certainly, part of the book's greatness lies in Green's riveting treatment of circumstance, which leaves the protagonist, Henry Scobie, sympathetic, trapped, and ultimately a victim of his innocent honor. Another element of its greatness is the writing. Here's Scobie comforting a dying child in a hospital. "He heard a small scrapping voice repeat, "Father," and looking up he saw the blue and bloodshot eyes watching him... He could see the breast of the child struggling for breath to repeat the heavy word; he came over to the bed and said, "Yes, dear. Don't speak, I'm here." The night-light cast the shadow of his clenched fist on the sheet and it caught the child's eye. An effort to laugh convulsed her, and he moved his hand away. "Sleep, dear," he said, "you are sleepy. Sleep." A memory he had carefully buried returned and taking out his handkerchief he made the shadow of a rabbit's head fall on the pillow beside her. "There's your rabbit," he said, "to go to sleep with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep."... He moved the rabbit's ears up and down, up and down. Then he heard Mrs. Bowles's voice, speaking low just behind him. "Stop that," she said harshly, "the child's dead."
Rating:
Summary: Excellent in every way
Review: This is one of the masterpieces of our time and having read it twice confirms that fact. Every true story, said Pappa Hemingway, ends in death. Greene's story is no exception. The things I liked the best were the fully developed and consistent characters, the fast pace, the amazing density, and the logical conclusion which is esthetically pleasing and morally correct. For those of us who write novels this is a textbook of how to carry the story questions and keep the reader interested. The subtle humor also helps. Read it yourself and let me know what you think.
Rating:
Summary: Truly tragic...
Review: This is the first Graham Greene book that I have read, and it definitely will not be my last. The Heart of the Matter is the tragic story of being the ultimate martyr. Scobie, who is the protagonist, has an overwhelming sense of duty to everyone but himself. Set in a claustrophobic African city Scobie's honesty and sense of justice seems to bring out the worst in everyone else. He is often accused of sleeping with the locals or taking bribes from the Syrians, all of which is not true. His largest responsibilty is his wife, Louise who he feels unhappiness is his own fault and therefore must fix it by sending her to South Africa. In order to do that he has to borrow money from a well known diamond smuggler Yusef. Throw into the mix a jealous letter censor named Wilson who is in love with Louise. Not to mention his lover Helen who has her own needs and demands. Many comparisons are drawn between Scobie and Christ in terms of sacrifice. The only difference is no one asked for Scobie's sacrafices and they provide for his unnecessary demise. While the book is heartbreaking in its failed human relations it is also beautiful and filled with insight into human greed, lust, jealousy and regret.
Rating:
Summary: Truly an intriguing read
Review: Scobie, a British police officer stationed in a nameless (perhaps Sierra Leone) West African state in the waning years of the Second World War, is a desperately principled soul. After sending his wife to South Africa on holiday (an expensive proposition that causes him to need to borrow a sum of money from the local-Syrian-moneylender/black marketeer, Yusef), he finds himself driven perversely to commit adultery. Yusef and Scobie's relationship, as a subtext, provides a deeply interesting foil to the four-cornered relationship between Scobie, his wife, Helen (the adulteress), and Wilson (who professes to love Scobie's wife...behavimg much in the fashion of a dog). Through the interplay of Yusef and Scobie, Greene provides the reader insight into the fundamental shallowness and duplicity of human relationships...professed friendship and blackmail dominate. The heart of the matter, as expressed here, is that human relationships are implicitly inferior to the relationship that we may choose to experience with the divine. As for Scobie, he ... himself by taking sacrament (communion bread) without first confessing himself. Immediately subsequent, he is stricken by angina, leading him inexorably to his end. This is a deeply tragic, engrossing, and ultimately profoundly moving, read. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Heart of the Matter
Review: Henry Scobie is a man whose life has been marred by the tragic death of a child. He sees himself as a complete failure. Scobie is a policeman located in a fictional British Colony on the Atlantic coast of equatorial Africa during the early years of WW2. Basically a decent person, Scobie can no longer satisfy or tolerate his wife, Loiuse, emotional needs. In trying to pay the way for a holiday for Loiuse, Scobie borrows money from a welthy Syrian. This transaction leads to Scobie compromising his own ethical standards and eventually leads to tragedy. During Louise's absence, Scobie meets and falls in love with a younger woman. This affair only serves to intesify Scobie's unhappines. In the end Scobie beleives that he has let down everybody, including himself and GOD. At the end he comes to feel that his own death is the only thing that can accomplish happiness for those he loves.
Rating: 
Summary: Indulgence Leads to Demise.....A Thoughtful Read
Review: The Heart of the Matter is not a mystery, a high-octane adventure, nor does it center on an extraordinary event. Rather it is a story of one man whose faith and character is put to the ultimate test. That man is Henry Scobie. Henry Scobie is a British assistant police comissioner stationed in a West African coastal town during World War II. Scobie is a devout catholic who is unhappily married but feels obligated to fulfill his wife Louise's needs and make her happy. An honest man, Scobie has remained faithful to his wife in their fifteen years of marriage and has upheld his duties as an officer of the law. But when Louise decides to get away for a while because she does not like the town they are in, Scobie's beliefs and convictions get challenged and he fails to measure up to the man he thought he was. He winds up falling in love with a nineteen-year old girl and during the affair he feels torn over his desire to be with her yet continue to keep his wife happy and to honor God. At the same time his work also suffers, as he begins to do business with some unscrupulous characters. His good reputation and sense of self-worth deteriorates day by day. Distraught and at the end of his rope, Scobie takes extreme measures to overcome his conflicts and the story wraps up with a shocking conclusion that leaves the reader with plenty to ponder. At times the plot moved slowly, however, Greene did a fabulous job at capturing the ambiguity of the human condition and providing insight into the inner demons that plague us all. Many of Greene's famous quotes came from this book, including my favorite, "Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil--or else an absoulute ignorance." I think William Golding said it best when he stated, "Graham Greene will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
Rating:
Summary: accidental masterwork
Review: Scobie is an honest middle aged Colonial policeman in Africa with an unhappy wife, few friends, no money and little chance of advancement. He and his men, and Wilson--a spy who has fallen in love with Scobie's wife--are trying to break up a diamond smuggling operation in their port city, which is especially busy with the outbreak of World War II. When Scobie's wife decides to go to South Africa & prepare the way for his retirement, he is unable to raise the required cash. Yusef, a Syrian merchant suspected of the diamond smuggling, offers to lend him the money. Scobie recognizes the inherent dangers in such an arrangement but he longs to make his wife happy and so accepts the loan. With his wife gone, Scobie stumbles into an affair with Helen Rolt, a shipwreck survivor. A devout Catholic, Scobie is tormented by guilt over this affair and when his wife writes to inform him of her decision to return, he is faced with an insoluble dilemma. He wants to make both women happy and he wants "peace & solitude" for himself. Compounding his problem, Yusef and Wilson have both found out about the affair & use the knowledge for their own ends. Eventually, and inevitably, Scobie determines that there is only one way out of his predicament. I read some comments by Greene about the book in which he said that the book the critics and public read is not the book he was trying to write. Despite himself, he gave us a terrific book about Scobie's struggles to be a good man and be true to his faith in God. GRADE: A
Rating:
Summary: Greene's Mastery of Moral Ambiguity
Review: In this novel, set in a steamy west African port during WWII, an unhappily married British police officer balances the demands of his wife, his mistress, and his Catholic moral conscience. The latter translates with sensitive consideration into any moral conscience. He balances them unsuccessfully. A fine, if disturbing, read.
Rating:
Summary: The Heart of Greene
Review: "The Heart of the Matter" is the story of Major Scobie, a relatively high-ranking policeman struggling vainly for advancement in a small coastal African town. He remains with a wife he doesn't really love out of an extreme sense of duty and loyalty. For those familiar with Greene's "The End of the Affair," it is almost as though Greene took Henry Miles, the cuckold who remains married to Sarah because it is comfortable, and made him the protagonist of a novel. Scobie, a converted Catholic, seems to take his religious convictions more seriously than his wife, who is more concerned with appearances and the way the socialites in town regard her. In this small coastal town, the attention she pays to her public standing quickly appears as it is, rudely farcical. Trying to separate himself from his wife, Scobie strikes up a tenuous relationship with Yusef, a suspected Syrian smuggler. When she leaves for a vacation, Scobie falls for Helen Rolt, a young widow. Herein, the main action of the novel begins, as Scobie finds himself forced to reconcile his dead love for his wife with his affections for Helen, his career, and his relationship to Yusef, all within the context of his Catholic faith. A truly amazing work. I am convinced that Graham Greene simply did not know how to write a bad novel.
Rating:
Summary: 'The terrible promiscuous passion'
Review: 'The word "pity" is used as loosely as the word "love"', Greene writes in this novel: 'Pity: the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.' Far from being a novel about the struggle between private passion and public duty, The Heart of the Matter reveals the struggle between pity and pity. Scobie, thought by many critics to be a 'tragic hero', in the Aristotelian sense, is destroyed because his pity becomes monstrously self-centred, it becomes his 'hubris'. Sex is replaced in this novel by pity. Scobie's infidelity is in pitying another woman, not in sleeping with her. Caught between pity for his wife and pity for his 'lover', Scobie is a untypical adulterer; and caught between his belief in God and his desire to suspend the ethical norms in which he operates, Scobie is an untypical Catholic. Yet this novel is typical of Greene, in that it portrays untypical people, feeling untypical things for other untypical people. Fascinated always with paradox, Greene presents a world in which humanity is presented as 'cannon fodder in a war too balanced ever to be concluded.'
|
