Catholic Guilt

The Heart of the Matter
By Graham Greene

I loved "The Quiet American" so much that I thought I'd read some more Graham Greene. From what I know about the guy, "The Heart of the Matter" is classic Greene: exotic locale, adulterous love affair, Catholic guilt.

It tells the story of Scobie, a British police officer in colonial West Africa, and his affair with a much younger British woman. As the story begins, his wife is miserable, his career is going nowhere (although he seems to like it that way)and the Second World War has begun. Eventually, he borrows money from a guy he knows he shouldn't be borrowing money from, and sends his wife to the supposedly safer and happier South Africa. While she's away he meets Helen, a young victim of a wartime ship sinking. They fall in love, or something like it, and things come to a head when his wife returns.

Greene's writing is elegant without ever being flowery. And, as with "The Quiet American," his voice seems part of the racist/imperialist worldview of the time while also being above it. I think if someone tried to write one of these books today, it would be a lot harder to pull off this attitude. You'd have to explain that it was just accepted wisdom at the time that you'd talk about "the natives" as if they were children. And in explaining, you'd remove yourself and your readers from the experience.

That kind of balance was striking in "The Quiet American," but it's downright awkward in "The Heart of the Matter."

Spoiler Alert!

The problem I'm referring to comes in the last third of the book, when Scobie's wife has returned, his dealings have come under suspicion and he is wracked with guilt over his sins. I don't mean he feels guilty for cheating on his wife. I mean he feels guilty because he goes to Mass and takes communion like everything's normal in an effort to conceal his cheating from his wife. This makes him feel like he has condemned his soul. He's cheating on God. As a non-Catholic, I found this sort of hard to understand but I'll roll with it. What really bugged me was that Scobie ends up getting his houseboy, Ali, killed in an effort to conceal his sins. Scobie feels bad about it, but not so bad as he does about taking communion. It seems to me that a decent human being (and up to this point, Scobie does seem like a decent, if flawed human being) would feel worse about getting his employee/friend killed.

It's bad enough that Scobie should not put this on the top of the list of his sins, but it really bugged me that neither does Greene.