The Heart of the Matter

Book Description

2 Reviews

• 

  Since my professor introduced Graham Greene to me, he has become one of my favourite writers. The Heart of the Matter is a powerful book that looks deep into pity, guilt, duty, failure and faith.
  Scobie is a police officer that doesn't have much success in life. His failure draws him to people that ... (continue)

  Since my professor introduced Graham Greene to me, he has become one of my favourite writers. The Heart of the Matter is a powerful book that looks deep into pity, guilt, duty, failure and faith.
  Scobie is a police officer that doesn't have much success in life. His failure draws him to people that he can pity on eg his wife who is a laughing stock in the white society as her husband is seen to be an inferior officer who deliberately refuses to retire or move elsewhere. He is also attracted to Helen, a average-looking survivor of a shipwreck who loses her husband.
  Sympathy then turns into duty. He thinks he has the duty to cheer his wife Louise up. He has the duty to make things clear for Helen. But the duties are just weights created and borne by himself. Scobie feels guilty about the adultery out of his sympathy for Helen and about borrowing money from a shady Syrian trader so that Louise can leave the country. Although Scobie is aware of being a Catholic, he is not particularly religious. The debate of suicide is not necessarily between himself and God, but between himself and his duty-conscious mentality.
  The writer successfully depicts the struggle of the characters that we can more or less identify with. It's another brilliant book that makes one reflect on life.

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  Flora Sau said on May 11, 2010 | Add your feedback

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  Men, God, Love and Empire

  The fierceness of this book beats down on me like the tropical sun that illuminates the life of the characters within it, and the emotional tenor feels like a hot sweat the memory of which is still salty sharp despite the coming of evening coolness as I weigh up its themes.

  Stefan Zweig once ... (continue)

  The fierceness of this book beats down on me like the tropical sun that illuminates the life of the characters within it, and the emotional tenor feels like a hot sweat the memory of which is still salty sharp despite the coming of evening coolness as I weigh up its themes.

  Stefan Zweig once wrote about the dangers of pity, and this novel by Greene is in reality almost a paean to that sensibility, to a love of failure, and how we are caught up in ideas of duty and steadfastness, and how betrayed we are by our weakness and guilt.

  The novel starts off strongly, and is a regular page-turner but it does feel hollow at the end, inconsequential, just as consequences bite, and the main character, Scobie, comes to his own reckoning of things - with a writer of Greene's calibre, however, this feels to be a deliberate effect, rather than the story's losing strength. On the other hand, there is a journey ever inwards, from behaviour, to psyche, to soul, and the last monologues are abundantly theological.

  The work is peppered with glorious one-liners, startlingly succinct phrases that hazard whole philosophies in a single sentence, lines that seem so right that you sit up and shake your head.

  There's also something here for the non- native English speaker in terms of how Empire might have felt, and by extension how multiculturalism is still perhaps underpinned in modern British society by a certain history and sense of experienced mission on the part of the political class, which still haunts Whitehall.

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  OwnedLibrarian said on Jun 30, 2009 | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Paperback 272 Pages
• Edition: New
• ISBN-10: 0099478420
• ISBN-13: 9780099478423
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Pub date: Nov 02, 2004
• Dimensions: 1226 mm x 839 mm x 129 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Hardcover, Audio Cassette, Library Binding, Others and eBook
• In other languages: other languages 繁體書, Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani

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