“No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.” This devastating quip, on page 75 of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter , published in 1948, sets the tone for this novel of contradictions and moral dilemmas.
It is the story of Henry Scobie, a police officer in a British colony in Sierra Leone during World War II, who is pulled in two directions, to his wife Louise whom he pities and feels responsible for, and his mistress Helen whom he can’t love. Scobie and Louise share a painful memory, that of a lost child, and as James Wood says in his introduction to the book: “...it is perhaps this wound that has made him so helplessly drawn to the wounds of others.”
It’s when his poetry-loving, deeply sad wife is at her lowest that Scobie feels inexorably drawn to her: “...he was bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.”
Everything about this outpost in Sierra Leone makes Louise unhappy—its harsh climate, its unfriendly people, its loneliness—and once her husband is passed over for promotion as police chief, she wants him to help her get away, to South Africa. When Scobie promises to fulfil her wish, despite the lack of funds, his character is severely tested and he descends into depths of despair.
Other bits of suffering come his way: the suicide of Pemberton, a young district commissioner, which Scobie has to investigate. As a Catholic, Scobie knows suicide is a sin, and yet he feels god will forgive Pemberton because he is not a Catholic and he is so young. As he tells the priest, Father Clay, “We’d be damned because we know, but he doesn’t know a thing.”
When the priest starts telling him about the Church’s teachings, Scobie retorts: “Even the Church can’t teach me that God doesn’t pity the young....” Pemberton’s suicide haunts Scobie: “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery.” And then again: “If one knew... the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”
World of greys
In his review, George Orwell famously said the two halves of Scobie do not fit together. But a Greene novel is difficult to compartmentalise, nothing is as it seems—as Pico Iyer writes in his beautiful tribute The Man Within My Head : “The world of Greene is a world of greys.... It is not that good and bad do not exist, but that they are so improbably mixed, in constantly shifting proportions, that we cannot begin to tell friend from foe or right from wrong....”
The novel ends with Scobie’s suicide—and a priest’s “near absolution” of this action. He tells Louise they shouldn’t judge Scobie: “I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
