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: Dark and powerful
Review: The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene is perhaps the darkest Greene novel I've read to date, and that's saying something. The setting, the barrenness of the main characters' social and personal lives and the apparent presence of the devil in the book combine to make this a depressing -- and engaging -- read by Greene, one of the master writers of the internal and spiritual landscape.
Henry Scobie is a police officer passed over for promotion for commissioner in a west African coastal colony of the British Empire in the twentieth century. The setting of the novel is indicative of the oppressive spiritual crisis that is to build and explode for Scobie throughout the course of the novel. The colony is either baking in heat or inundated with rains. At the end of each season, the characters seem about to go mad for want of the next, only to repeat the cycle of exhaustion. There are rats, cockroaches and other assorted irritating and dangerous creatures everywhere, in the houses and hotel rooms, in the baths, everywhere. Malaria hits Scobie early on, and we can see from his casual decision to "sweat it out" while on a trip to investigate a suicide that it's not an unusual occurrence. The pain of the landscape is exacerbated by WWII and the allegiances and enemies it creates in a faraway land as well as its rendering of normal activities, like writing and carrying letters for post, as crimes. This is a miserable, miserable place to be.
But Scobie seems to like it; he is comfortable in this landscape. He, unlike his wife, is not ambitious, and is not unhappy about being passed over for promotion. However, he does worry about the effect this has on his wife, Louise. His love for her is anything but idealized, if it even is love. He seems more to pity her than anything else and feels the burden to provide for her happiness however he can very deeply. They are both devoutly Catholic, and have lost a daughter in their marriage, their only child. Scobie, who writes "just the facts" in his diary every night noted their daughter's death with only, "C. died." against that day's date.
In an effort to provide for his wife's happiness, Scobie borrows money from a man of dubious character, Yusef, a Syrian merchant living in the colony who seems to be often under police surveillance. The money is spent to send Louise to South Africa. Both Scobie and Louise know that she is not liked in the colony and has few friends except for a new clerk, Wilson, who is not really welcomed at the club due to his lowly status. Wilson is in love with Louise and hates Scobie for not valuing her as he does (in idealizing her and his feelings).
It is in his dealings with Louise that we first see that Scobie is sadly unable to estimate her understanding of him and their relationship accurately. He always seems surprised when she guesses what he is thinking or when she knows he is lying to her about his feelings, etc. And yet they have been married some years. The reader starts to see that Scobie's view of others is (humanly) inaccurate and serves his own purposes of pity and concern more than it serves the future of any close relationship.
While Louise is gone, Scobie is called to a rescue site of some boat passengers who were victims of a German sea attack. Many tragically die, but one woman, who looks like a child as she is carried into his life on a stretcher clutching only a stamp album, becomes a new love interest to Scobie. Helen Rolt has lost her husband in the attack, and after her recovery is living in the colony waiting to return to England or move on somewhere else, and Scobie, in his efforts to care for her -- she was such a heartbreaking vision -- falls in love with her and starts an affair.
It isn't long before we can see the same patterns in his relationship with Helen that we see with Louise. He says he loves her -- and seems to -- and yet his love is played out only by promises he doubts he can fulfill and pitied concern. Again he underestimates his lovers' perception of realit; again he seems to have taken on a burden, rather than a companion; again he seems to be more lonely in the relationship than outside of it. And yet he craves it and cannot let it go. Even when Louise returns.
Scobie's spiritual life matters to him, and he, a policeman, is very concerned with the law, and struggles to cope with meeting the laws of his Christianity while pleasing and helping the two women he says he loves, neither of which seem to understand him completely, though they "get" him more than he seems to get them. In further dealings with Yusef, real and palpable evil comes into the story in a manner as oppressive as the weather and the climate. While Scobie seems to be succeeding in Louise's ambitions, he struggles more and more with meeting the law of his Catholicism while not hurting Louise or Helen.
The sad and tragic aspect of Scobie is that he sees the rules of his religious life more clearly than he sees the love and grace it is to provide for him. Just as in his relationships with women, he underestimates what God knows and understands about him and might do for him if asked. He takes on all the responsibility of the pain and loneliness and the evil of this place, while never seeking assistance. The pain of the last chapters is unrelenting, though a small bit of hope and grace is articulated by one of the characters toward the end. I'm clinging to these few words, or I'd lose all my hope myself.
Rating: 
Summary: Forget the hype, The Heart of the Matter is overrated
Review: There is a line somewhere in the middle of Greene's The Heart of the Matter where two charcters are discussing about a stroy they have read. One character says to the other, "This story is dull." I couldn't help but chuckle that the characters in this story could put Greene's story in such an accurate choice of words.
The Heart of the Matter does have some good insights about the depth of a man's soul, and near the end of the story we finally get some insight into this man's character, but that, unfortunatley, is short lived. There is some good ideas of man's guilt about religion and his relationship to God here, if only Greene could have figured out a better way to tie it all together.
The main problem with Greene's novel is that while you are reading it, you don't actually care about any of the cold, one dimentional characters portrayed here, with the exception of Scobie. The story takes forever to get going, and once it finally gets some steam to it, we are cheated by an over the top ending. The ending made this novel worse, in my opinion. It is not that I don't enjoy dark novels or twisted endings. In fact, some of the darkest novels are my most favorite. In those novels, however, I acutally cared about what happended in the end. This is one of the most overrated classics I have ever read. And I am sure when you get to the so called climatic, "shocking" ending, you will be thinking the same thing as I was. "Am I supposed to care?"
Grade: C-
Rating:
Summary: One has to accept the premises in order to begin.
Review: Were I to recommend a novel by Greene on his politics alone, I would recommend _The Quiet American_, or the _Human Factor_. This is a novel apparently very removed from Greene's later concerns- a Pascalian set piece, very akin to various pieces produced by Catholic novelists with a taste from Jansenism during the 1930s and 1940s (viz. the Brazilians Octavio de Faria and Lucio Cardoso) about the futility of Man searching salvation on the strenghth of one's good works and about the paramountacy of God's Grace that can save one in the last minute of one's life. But then there's is something in the feeling of alienation that Greene conveys in this novel that transcends his strictly Catholic concerns - an urge to make sense, to overcome the feeling of general meaningless, that makes his novel enjoyable and worthy of a recommendation for the more "general" public- and that perhaps explains the sharp turn made by Greene in the 1950s.
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable Masterpiece
Review: What is the "heart of the matter"? For me, Graham Greene ranks with Faulkner and Conrad in his unsparingly honest, yet empathetic insight into the human heart. And, not that of great men, but of ordinary people like you and me, who try so hard to stay right, not always succeeding, but often failing nobly. The Heart of the Matter is to me Greene's most vivid and memorable foray into this terra incognita. Scobie is noble, flawed and fully realized. The so-called "invented" world through which he walks is so richly atmospheric that it hardly seems fictional.The plot here is a bit less animated than in some of Greene's other famous novels, but the richness of character and detail keeps you involved. Ultimately, this is a book I will never forget, largely because it gave me the chance to view the world through the eyes of of another human being, which to me is truly the "heart of the matter."
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