The Heart of the Matter

Still addicted to reading books about or set in Africa... A few weeks ago I roared through "Chasing the Devil," Tim Butcher's book about Sierra Leone and Liberia - where he describes his recent journey on foot through these two countries following the route taken by author and MI5 spy Graham Greene in the 1940s. Like his book on the Congo, it is evocative and very readable, bringing in in a very interesting way the history of these West African countries as well as their current situation and beautiful descriptions of the people, country and culture.

This put me in mind of reading Graham Greene's own novel set in West Africa, "The Heart of the Matter," drawing on his experiences in Sierra Leone. I had read the book years ago when I was in a Graham Greene phase, probably in my teens. All I remembered from that reading (some years before I ever went to Africa) was Greene's description of the overpowering heat and humidity, such that whenever he touched his wife or shook hands with someone, sweat sprang out of their skin. And the conflictedness of the main character, Scobie.

It was such a pleasure to read it again now. Partly just such a joy to read a well-written, carefully crafted book after rushing through a pretty rubbishy one before it (NOT Tim Butcher's!) But also this book has interesting themes and a background I could relate to to some extent, although set in truly colonial Africa.

In brief, the main character, Scobie, is a police officer whose marriage to Louise has long deteriorated into a relationship of pity and some guilt on one side (Scobie's) and dissatisfaction and continual complaining on the other. Eventually Scobie finds a way to send his wife to South Africa, to escape the heat and loneliness, and his failure to be promoted in the colony. When she has gone, he falls in love with a young widow, Helen, and has an affair with her. This is also largely motivated by pity for her, and his belief that he has to make her happy. This relationship begins to look a lot like his unhappy relationship with his wife. Then, just when Scobie has made a promise never to abandon Helen (in spite of his better judgment) Louise sends a telegram that she is on her way back by ship, having realised she should never have left him. There is also Wilson, who watches Scobie, and loves Louise. Everyone except Scobie soon identifies him as a British spy.

Scobie has a deep Catholic faith, but this mainly consists of a conviction that he has to be honest with God, that God surely pities the young and helpless, but that he will punish the unrepentant. Scobie comes to believe that by his adultery and then inability to make either his wife or his mistress anything but miserable he is also making God miserable. Eventually he decides that the only way to set them all free from the despair he has inflicted on them in spite of his earnest desire to make them happy, is to commit suicide. He believes that suicide will doom him to damnation, but he sees it as a self sacrifice to set everyone else including God free from the consequences of his sins.

The introduction to the book comments that this shows Scobie's terrible pride. It shows to me how little he understood his faith. But, there is incredible power in Greene's description of Scobie taking communion when he has decided to continue in the path of adultery, feeling overwhelmed by his hypocrisy and by the damnation he is certain he is eating and drinking on himself - but the most powerful part to me was the image of how as he took the bread and wine it was as if he was punching the already bleeding Christ in the face.

One telling thing about the book is how relationships with Africans are virtually non-existent. Scobie is described as feeling great affection for the local people, but he has no actual friendships with any of them except possibly his house boy Ali. That was no doubt true of the ex-pat community then. The smallness and claustrophobia, range of quirks and incestuousness of the ex-pat world is recognisable and conveyed very well - the goldfish bowl syndrome as we know it.

Greene makes the heat and the corrupted, down-at-heel atmosphere of the West African port city very real for the reader, but he rarely describes or uses a landscape explicitly, to the extent that the book could really have been set anywhere where there is a closed group of people, unhappy for various reasons and dependant on one another. There are frequent references to the vultures, cockroaches and rats living around the humans. One of my favourite sentences in the book describes a group of vultures gathered around a dead chicken, their old men's necks stooped over, their wings sticking out like broken umbrellas.

True, it is not a cheery read, but, it is fascinating and I loved it. Highly recommended.