With a new introduction by James Wood Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime west-African state, is distrusted -- being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in so doing, he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
'Christ had not been murdered: you couldn't murder God: Christ had killed himself':
'My experiences in Sierra Leone were rich enough, but I have never been satisfied with what I made of them.' So Graham Greene wrote in 1980, three decades after his publication of 'The Heart of the Matter.' Ever a tough self-critic, the novel has been far better received by scholars and audiences than Greene himself. This widespread success has helped to establish Greene as one of the twentieth century's leading British novelists and, with figures such as Evelyn Waugh, Paul Claudel, and François... more info
Worthy of a claim to greatness:
Over forty years ago a new English teacher at my school answered a question asked by an eager student. The question was, "What do you think is the greatest novel written in English?" He didn't think for very long before replying, "The Heart Of The Matter." We academically-inclined youths borrowed Graham Greene's novel from the library and eventually conferred. There were shrugs, some indifference, appreciation without enthusiasm. We were all about sixteen years old. I last re-read The Heart Of The... more info
A better book than "The Da Vinci Code"...:
Graham Greene does something in The Heart of the Matter which is extremely difficult to do: he depicts the inner turmoil and emotional breakdown of a human being in a non-pretentious, non-self-conscious, completely BELIEVABLE way. So many other allegedly great authors have tried to do the same thing, with very few successes. Most often you get turgid "prose" which reeks of pseudo-intellectual showboating, turning the character in question from a flesh-and-blood entity into a cipher, which leads to a... more info
Who know "what goes on in a single human heart"?:
The setting for Greene's novel, although never named, is Sierra Leone, where the author himself spent some time as an intelligence officer. But law enforcement, subterfuge, and colonialism serve as mere (if occasionally satiric) sideshows for the crisis of faith of one well-meaning, upright policeman, Scobie, whose fatal flaw is a sometimes-misguided sympathy for those closest to him. Even Scobie's troubled relationship with his wife is described early on as one in which "pity and responsibility... more info
