Details
Synopsis
This 1948 story of moral decay was one of Graham Greene's greatest popular and critical successes, though not one of his own favorites. His hero Scobie is a colonial police commissioner in West Africa. He endures a loveless marriage and a nondescript career patiently enough until he falls in love with a young shipwreck survivor who, literally, washes ashore at his feet. To send his wife on an extended holiday to South Africa, he borrows money from a Syrian merchant, who then uses his position to blackmail Scobie into turning a blind eye to his smuggling. Once his wife returns home, Scobie finds that he can no longer reconcile his affection for his mistress with his duties as a husband, a policeman, and a Catholic, and is pressed to a desperate resolution of his confusions. One of Greene's aims in this novel was to open a philosophical exploration into the differences between pity (which he sees as destructive) and compassion (which is positive). Upon its publication, Greene commented, "I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe, and America--the last title to which I had ever aspired."
| Details | | Series: | Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century |
| Size | | Length: | 242 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 10.9 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork."
Industry Reviews
"It is impossible not to feel a kind of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved to Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish."
New Yorker - George Orwell (07/17/1948)
"It is sometimes said that Graham Greene is not in the English literary tradition. Surely this is a sectarian thing to say. He seems to me to be fully in the tradition of Bunyan and Donne and Newman and Thomas More and many others such, and two of these only were Catholics. I cannot help feeling, however, that all those had greater kindness and tolerance, even Bunyan with his intense feeling of being alone before the Alone; and kindness and tolerance are two of the most precious inheritances of the English tradition. In 'The Power and the Glory' we had a tremendous assertion of the infinite kindness and tolerance of God, which, in filling this weakness or gap that we had felt in the earlier books, enlarged its author to the full stature of his genius. My disappointment with ['The Heart of the Matter'], although the suggestion is thrown out that Scobie also may be forgiven, may, in the end, be that we have regressed again to Jehovah, to the tin chapel with ZOAR painted across the windows and a watery light falling on the dusty benches and the bare walls, and the workers from the mills daring to hope that they may yet be saved."
Britain Today - Sean O'Faolain (08/19/1948)
"['The Heart of the Matter'] is a book which only a Catholic could write and only a Catholic can understand. I mean that only a Catholic can understand the nature of the problem. Many Catholics, I am sure will gravely misunderstand it, particularly in the United States of America, where its selection as the Book of the Month will bring it to a much larger public than can profitably read it. There are loyal Catholics here and in America who think it the function of the Catholic writer to produce only advertising brochures setting out in attractive terms the advantages of Church membership. To them this profoundly reverent book will seem a scandal. For it not only portrays Catholics as unlikeable human beings but shows them as tortured by their Faith."
Commonweal - Evelyn Waugh (07/16/1948)
"A powerful, deep-striking novel, with the surface calm of a summer river, and underneath the swift, drowning melancholy of a spirit lost in the darkness of the flesh, the flesh of a man bound in promise, responsibility, theology, and belief to the flesh of a woman he no longer loved."
New York Herald Tribune Book Review - Thomas Sugrue (07/11/1948)
"A policeman's lot is not a happy one. The white (and dark) man's burden must always be heavy. And man's debt to man will be forever in arrears--from West Africa to the West End, from Brooklyn to Bucharest. Generations of novelists have wrestled with these melancholy truisms. It is a pleasure to report that Graham Greene, in 'The Heart of the Matter,' has wrestled brilliantly with all three--and scored three clean falls."
New York Times - Du Bois (07/11/1948)
"A work that will unquestionably add another cubit to Mr. Greene's creative stature."
Saturday Review - H.M Robinson (07/10/1948)
"This is a novel of considerable seriousness and stature in which the sensational brilliance of [Greene's] previous writing has been subdued by a strong sense of faith."
Plomer
"'The Heart of the Matter' epitomizes what has gone before in Mr. Greene's earlier work. He is a writer whom it is not easy to classify, but one whose powers of development, in style and attitude of mind, seem to show an ever-renewed vitality."
Robinson
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