… there are limits to what I can do to you – or them. He addresses his God from the back of an empty church:
When he discovers that all the actions he took to try to help Helen and his wife, have after all been failures, he takes what he feels is the only course left to him. He makes it the fatal flaw that brings Scobie down, leading inexorably to a crisis of conscience and, ultimately, his spiritual damnation. Scobie knowingly transgresses against his Catholic beliefs when he embarks on his adulterous affair, then suffers a fear of taking Communion while the stain of his mortal sin of adultery lies about him and then finds he is unable even to pray. His purpose, he said, was to illustrate the “disastrous effect on human beings of pity.” Pity for Greene is an egotistical trait deriving from an abundance of pride rather than true compassion for the welfare of others. That was not however the reaction Greene intended in writing Heart of the Matter. It was hard to read this novel and not feel sympathy for this tortured soul whose actions are taken in the belief that they are what will help the people he cares for. Scobie’s downward spiral accelerates when he falls in love with Helen, a widow almost half his age, the survivor from an attack on a flotilla of ships making its way along the coast. It proves a fateful decision when the trader begins exerting pressure on Scobie to turn a blind eye to his diamond smuggling activities. He feels pity for his wife’s plight but can help her only by taking the one step he has vowed never to take – borrowing money from a Syrian trader known for his dubious business practices. For almost 15 years she’s endured the suffocating heat and annual monsoon, the humidity that turns her treasured poetry books mouldy unless wiped daily and the vultures that perch on the tin roof of their home (which is essentially little more than a shack on stilts) She begs Scobie to return home to England or – failing that – for a holiday in South Africa. He is disappointed but for his wife Louise, this news is the final humiliation. As the book opens Scobie hears he has been passed over for promotion. He’s a man of high integrity although his scruples and his reserved nature have made him something of an outsider amongst the other British settlers. Henry Scobie is an assistant police commissioner stationed in a British controlled West African coastal town during World War 2. In The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene takes a fundamentally ordinary decent man down a path that leads to spiritual conflict and despair.
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