"Scobie thought: what are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her -- don't wear that dress, don't say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I've made of her. She wasn't always like this."
The Heart of the Matter is set in a West African town by the ocean, during World War II. The town is occupied by the British, but there are Indians and Syrians there, too, as well as the natives -- it is the original Tower of Babel in the words of one character. The British authorities are primarily occupied with the ships that come to port, searching each to prevent the smuggling of diamonds to Axis forces. A precarious sense of order prevails during the day, as the book's main character, the policeman Scobie, tends to both war-related matters and local law enforcement. But underneath the blank smiling face of a native (or an Englishman) stirs something sinister, which emerges under the cover of darkness in the form of illicit transactions, plots of intrigue, and bloody crimes committed on the wharf.
We are, of course, not only in West Africa, but the familiar territory of Graham Greene. And, true to form, the town is not just a far-flung colonial outpost, but the battlefield of a man's soul. The Nazis, the diamond smuggling, a war that killed millions -- these serve as a background for Scobie's struggle, which stems from that most commonplace of difficulties: an unhappy marriage.
Scobie is a good man. He does not lie, he does not cheat, and he strives to do the least amount of harm. He is, like Greene, a converted Catholic. Like any good man with a modicum of power he is weighed down by a sense of responsibility, for the orderly upkeep of the town, the well-being of his servants, and, above all, the happiness of his poor, suffering wife, the object of mockery described in the passage above. And, like any good Catholic, he blames himself for her misery, for keeping her in this stifling town for fifteen long years, amidst fatuous expatriates who are determined to preserve the etiquette of the clubs and boarding schools of their homeland.
Scobie's crisis begins when he falls for another woman, a young widow whom he pities as much as his wife. This sets off a series of events in which the good man, little by little, succumbs to the evil that is everywhere around him, and to which so far he has been immune. It is an old story, but what sets this one apart is the cause of Scobie's downfall, which is not the classic temptation of sin, but Scobie's drive to be good. It is the religion he makes of his wife, who embodies his vow to be a better man, and the sin for which he must atone. But she does not want his sacrifice, and yearns to escape his overbearing pity, which mirrors the conundrum that Scobie himself confronts as he grapples with God: who, in the end, shoulders the cross? The one martyred, or the one for whom the sacrifice was made?
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