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Apr 27, 2016gord_ma rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
I remain divided about this book. On one hand, The Heart of the Matter may have won Graham Greene the James Tait Black Prize in 1948, but it lacked the intimacy, the suspense, the rage, the spirituality, and the poetic sensuousness that made Graham’s later 1951 novel The End of the Affair his best. On the other hand, this unhappy novel about unhappy selfish people who pity each other succeeds in transferring the shared apathetic disconnection between the characters to the reader and the book. One of Greene's explicitly Catholic novels, The Heart of the Matter concerned Henry Scobie, a pretentious British policeman, who was stuck in an undesirable West African post during World War II disconnected from the locals, his co-workers, his wife, his career, God, and even his own sanity. Regardless, Scobie was a man of many themes. He was the embodiment of failure. He was the nail that is caught stuck out regardless of his efforts not to stick out. He was, to summon the visage of John Donne, the island “entire of itself” and cut off from the main. And Scobie was also the destroyer of all things, and nothing that Scobie sought to protect or to enshrine failed to be corrupted and destroyed. Whether or not Scobie was a metaphor for the disconnection that modernity brought between individuals and individuals with God is really up for debate. But what was true was that Scobie, through his observations, set himself apart from the rest, judged others, pitied others, and took the lord's mantle in vain. Regardless, all of that stuff could be interesting to read. That Scobie brought nothing but unhappiness to the people he loved the most—or more precisely the people he pitied the most—would have made an interesting book. However, The Heart of the Matter wasn’t written like that. Rather than a novel that burns slowly before it rages out of control, Graham instead gave us a pilot light for 178 pages. And that pilot light only tantalizingly flickered in the last 60 pages before it fizzled out with an unrewarding, played-out ironic, and melodramatic borne out of paranoia and guilt. But perhaps, and as opposed to a combustible work like The End of the Affair, this was a more fitting, a more suitably bitter end for a novel full of bitter, unhappy people. Louise in particular was not just unhappy in the end, but she was bitter because Scobie was dead she could never finally settle her scores with him. And even in death, Scobie's melodramatic attempt to save everybody from himself continued to haunt Louise, now a socially ostracized widow of a suicide. His death and his motives serve as a wedge between her and Edward Wilson, a man who, unlike Scobie, could actually reciprocate her interests and though not necessarily reciprocate her passions. And perhaps, empathy was that most vital thing missing from this book. The characters in The Heart of the Matter pitied each other, judged each other, but none of the characters truly sought to grasp the needs and wants of the others. There's a very clinical selfishness and emotional void embedded in this novel, and perhaps there's a great lesson in it. However, those layers were so fine they just did not rise to the surface when they could have. Rating: 3.5/5 [2014-09-06]