In his 1948 novel, the Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene masterfully portrays the emotional and spiritual dilemmas of an aging man in a loveless marriage struggling through a moral crisis brought on by his failure to get promoted and his inability to make his wife happy. Greene dissects the heart and mind of Henry Scobie as he slowly falls apart as he makes one bad decision after another until he chooses to take communion while unrepentant in a state of a mortal sin. He is convinced that he is eternally damned, so he devises a way to commit suicide without anyone discovering the truth. In the end, his wife figures out that he had an affair and schemed to take is own life. Scobie ends a complete failure and doubly damned.
While I am not a Catholic, it was insightful to get into the mind of a nominal believer and experience his struggles of faith and conscience. Hopefully I can learn from his mistakes and find forgiveness and redemption in Christ for my moral failures and not take the path of Henry Scobie.
The novel is set on the west coast of Africa during the second world war. Since Greene spent time in the region as a British intelligence officer in Sierra Leone, the novel feels real and much of the descriptions of the climate and culture are captivating. Greene also has keen insight into human psychology and relationships which is very instructive.
The oppressive heat and rain depicted frequently in the novel symbolizes the moral and emotional condition of the main character. Almost all of the action of the novel takes place in a tiny white community in an African colony, with only a few non-white characters struggling under the dominion of the colonial British. This symbolizes the alienation Scobie feels, and while he belongs to the ruling class, he is subject to forces larger than himself which increasingly alienate him from God, his wife, and his lover.
The novel has been declared to be one of the best English-language novels of the twentieth century.
