The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene – A book review

Nothing’s ever enough for anyone! Not even goodness; time and again it needs to be proven; a thankless virtue that’s ostentatiously expected to lay bare, naked for others to see. Seeing is believing, isn’t it; mere feeling is not!

There have been very few books that I’ve liked from the very first pages, very few characters that have struck so strongly, a chord – the right one, for me to shake hands with and smile at them instantaneously the moment they were introduced.

“Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men”

            Scobie, a God fearing man as one can possibly be; not as God fearing as much as God loving, is an honest policeman in an African state in the times of World War II. His honesty, like always is seen as a banality to be pitied by others. He’s been passed over for promotion in the middle of a war. Scobie is content with the banal life that he lives, the place that he is in but; and there’s always a but! His wife Louise, who he loved immensely once, cared for, still cares, has gradually turned out to be, rather a responsibility than the love that once existed. Her inability to make friends, her happiness is of immediate concern to him more than anything else. She wants to get away; she terms him as selfish for not being able to arrange the money to send her away.

            Torn in a turmoil of justness and responsibility, Scobie readily falls into the trap of Yusef, a smuggler, a crook, a local businessman when he borrows money from him to send her wife away. And the trap only widens; but anything for the happiness of his wife.

“It was a relief to be on board and no longer alone together.”

As Scobie’s wife is away, he falls hopelessly and sympathetically in love with a dying ship wrecked patient Helen, much younger to him. What starts as a friendship, soon gets entangled into the grip of a painful, pitiful love affair.

 “What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.”

“Oh”, she said, “why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.” – Helen

Scobie, now torn between his wife and an indignant lover, has a bigger concern – the answers that he has to give to the supreme. Very few, have I experienced to possess a soul so pure, such clarity in thoughts, so determined and conscious in actions, so strong willed. It’s so difficult to keep sanity intact in the midst of these inexorable, interminable thoughts that plague the mind; but it’s his heart that wins each time, a heart I term to be so pure.

Scobie now has to make a choice, never an easy one, between God and love, loyalty and sin. He is now derided by his lover as much as he is tested by his despairing wife. He’s responsible for one and immensely loves the other.

“We were happy. Doesn’t it seem odd? – we were happy,”

“Yes”

“Why do we go on like this – being unhappy?”

“It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,” Scobie said

“How often he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith.”

“Well then,” she said triumphantly, “be hung for a sheep. You are in – what do you call it – mortal sin? Now. What difference does it make?”

He thought: pious people, I suppose would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence. He said, “There is a difference – a big difference. It’s not easy to explain. Now I’m just putting out love above – well, my safety. But the other – the other’s really evil. It’s like the Black Mass, the man who steals the sacrament to desecrate it. It’s striking God when he’s down – in my power.”

And he, finally in an act of contrition chooses love over God; he finds God in love. What doesn’t exist won’t hurt the ones he loves, would it and like the Lord, he sacrifices himself at the altar of love.

“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.”

And because I love you so much Scobie, I detest your wife even more. She calls you selfish; her resentment seems so shallow when she’s the one who deserted you and came back only to chain you to responsibility, to gather safety because you were happy with someone else. You did all that you could and more for her but it didn’t take her much time to give herself to another when you were gone.

Many would indict Scobie for what he did, call his damnation, his act of complete contrition as cowardice. I don’t support it of course but that’s who he was; who am I to stand between him and God. I envy you Scobie for being able to love so purely.

Like the doctor in ‘Anil’s Ghost’, like Estha in ‘The God of Small Things’, Scobie stays with me and will forever. I have closed these books but they stay with me, these great souls; they for me are men of God. When I sit beside the serene waters of a lake, I’ll think of you Scobie, the calm that you possessed, the inner turmoil that you kept hidden from everyone, the sacrifice that you made.

“Why he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, “I love you.” He thought: It’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page.

“When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity...”

Thank you Graham Greene for taking me through this journey with Scobie, for miraculously expressing and passing on each of your, his thoughts to me.

This book was recommended by a friend, Giedre and I thank her immensely for introducing me to Graham Greene; he’s at the top of my favourite’s list now!

 

My rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 10/10

 

Images copyright:

Book cover - https://anokatony.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/%E2%80%9Cthe-heart-of-the-matter%E2%80%9D-by-graham-greene/
Graham Greene image - http://www.trespassmag.com/graham-greene/

 

Graham Greene