THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

Written by a renowned 20th century British author based in part by his experiences, this tale follows the descent of Scobie, a deputy police commissioner on the lookout for smuggled diamonds in a North African colonial outpost during WW2. It was written just after the war, and I’m drawn to well-told stories by witnesses to the period: you are almost sitting in the rooms with the comforts of another period they describe, and conversing with the same archaic words as the protagonists. Mr. Graham delivers all this as he lovingly creates a colonial class-driven society of boarding school-educated junior officers with attendant pomp, insecurities, and jealousies. Scobie is surprisingly content with his duties in the corrupt, unhealthy steaming outpost, and soldiers on with a grim sense of responsibility to his wife and job. He is freed from his dutiful, but loveless, marriage when he takes a loan out from an unsavory character to fund his wife’s relocation to South Africa. The war seems remote, but it hits home when a merchant ship is torpedoed, and the survivors come into Scobie’s life. He begins a torrid affair with one of them, and is blackmailed into a web of lies. His sentiment towards responsibility triggers a Catholic burden that rages as he faces confession and communion: ‘As far as God, he could speak to him only as one speaks to an enemy…’ Scobie’s wayward deeds trigger his plunge into depression and fatalism, and spark an internal showdown to drive the voice of God out of his being, as he contemplates his final solution.