Chronicle of a struggle within
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This is a magnificent book. It starts quite ordinarily enough and takes its time to get going but the wait is worth it. The first third of the novel is solid character building; and what characters they are. Green has a real talent for creating amazing personalities who you want to know more and more about. The central figure of Scobie is of course treated in great detail but the other people in the book jump out vividly too. From the ineffective priest Father Rank to my favourite the disgusting scheming Yusef, right through to more minor characters such as Harris and his terribly shabby hotel room in which he hunts cockroaches; not one is badly drawn.
This book is regarded as one of Greene Catholic novels and while there is a great deal of Catholic symbolism and debate about the nature of religion and the ultimate fate of the soul I found it to be rather a story about morality. Scobie is very strict with himself, he is someone who wrestles with his life and his place in the world. I am an atheist and have no time for thoughts about eternal damnation and the like but Greene's skilful writing makes Scobie's self torture amazingly compelling reading. Visual images such as the following are just fantastic to read as Scobie tries to come to terms with the results of his actions.
He thought: my heart has hardened, and he pictured the fossilised shells one picks up on a beach: the stony convolutions like arteries.
I found the conclusion to the story to be entirely predictable but was not disappointed by this in the least. Hints are dropped very early on by events in the story as to what the end will be and the reader is drawn inexorably onwards toward the inevitable finish. Green doesn't flinch at the end.
I will certainly be reading more of Graham Greene's work in the future.
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Real matter at Heart!
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About three weeks ago I picked up `The Heart of the Matter' - Greene's novel of 1948 set in West Africa during the Second World War.
I first read this about 30 years ago - It has everything I remember - but a lot more.
Perhaps because I've been working on `The Taming of the Shrew' at the same time - elements of religion, marriage and identity have stood out in focus in a way I don't remember. The Shrew is a play all about seeking salvation through appropriate partnering - The Heart of the Matter, how salvation is individual and not to be found in others.
This was a pretty dismal, depressing read the first time - it touched on the meaning of existence and right way to live - on lovelessness and the unforgivable: What I hadn't tasted then was the existential angst, the deepness of the despair and the strength of individual choice.
Major Scobie, our everyman, is a policeman with a wife - respectability personified. He is hated by the ex-pats because he isn't corrupt - and loved by the Syrian dealer in corruption for the same reason. His lack of corruption perversely makes him untrustworthy to his own kind - and his career suffers as a consequence. The only true friendship comes from the Syrian, Yusef - very not British - and it is a friendship Scobie can never accept.
It is Scobie's fall from grace we follow - in the true meaning of the words: He is not ruined in any earthly way - but his spiritual existence is, at least in his own mind, spiraling ever further down through the circles of hell.
In one of the more frighteningly understandable images of the book, Scobie sees himself as fisting god - not fighting in the abstract, but physically punching and damaging the flesh: It is an image which horrifies in its very physicality - and in the clarity of self-knowledge Scobie exhibits.
Around this dying light flutter a whole cast of shadow-dwelling characters.
Scobie's wife is damaged goods - her husband's incorruptibility has driven her to this god forsaken land so she has plunged into the superficialities of Catholic dogma - the ritual and the literal making her empty life fuller. She reads books and poetry - replacing any real inner life with printed words and borrowed sounds.
She is not a fool - but it is her needs that keep what is left of their marriage alive - most of it died with a young daughter back in England. Her leaving to live in South Africa opens the gap needed for a replacement `needer' - and the final human dilemma that shatters Scobie's relationship with the divine.
Wilson, spy-on-his-own-kind, and writer of trash poetry; driving Scobie no more than a mosquito could - tolerated as a fact of the environment - in `love' with Scobie's wife and emptying the word of all depth.
Helen, fallen woman and siren - who is no more than a vessel the fates use to trap Scobie - from her very first appearance as love-less, dried-skin of a girl clutching a stamp-album to near-whore for the ex-pat wild boy.
A priest who knows he serves no one well - least of oll Scobie; a priest who needs to confess as much as to listen to confession - but perhaps the only one who sees the real relationship of Scobie to his god - who appreciates the complexities and ultimate unknowability of any meaning in life.
These moths flicker in and out of the life that is Scobie - contrasting their weaknesses with the immense strength he is using in his `psychomachia' - his soul-struggle.
Scobie is ultimately heroic - in his choice and in facing of the consequences of that choice. He is very much a 20th Century man - having both the consciousness and anxiety William Golding identified as hallmarks in the work of Graham Greene.
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Morality's Conflicts
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Another of his books where his Catholicism is very strongly on show. It is an excellent book telling of a colonial policeman, passed over for promotion and thereby unable to help his wife's longing for social status. Scobie feels like he has failed in his duty towards her and sends her off on a holiday he can ill afford, having to borrow money from a local villain to do so. We see how an honest man is conflicted between duty and honesty and the affair affair when it happens further conflicts his morality. As with all Greene's books it is expertly written and they are far more than just novels. Highly recommended.
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Disapointing
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After reading The Quiet American I was expecting something in the same vein. I found myself getting bored with a novel badly constructed and at some time chaotic. If I would not have read the introduction I would have never got the importance of religion in the life of the main character. It is difficult to believe that Scobie is torn between his duty, love and religious obligations. Yet we feel the heat but that's all and not enough.
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Greene's Masterpiece
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Generally recognised as Greene's masterpiece, the book follows Major Scobie is his tiring quest for righteousness in a climate of corruption, lies, and deceit.
As with most of his work, the account hinges on an exploration of what the character believes their Catholic faith really means to their life course. In Scobie's case he goes against the grain to conduct police business in an honest manner, and keeps his marriage going in spite of feeling imprisoned by the Holy union. Is it a loveless marriage? Greene also attempts to expound this through a comparison of love and loyalty.
Without revealing the story, what is very interesting is the author's painting of the Scobie's relationship and development of both Catholics' view of faith and relations. The master-stroke is truly the quandary that Scobie finds himself in and what he chooses as the escape.
If there were any criticism it would be that in a generally secular society as we have in Britain today many of the concepts and the ultimate predicament are difficult to comprehend for one without faith or an intimate understanding of such. If that were the case it would only be a four star novel.
However, this is an extremely powerful account and an insightful examination of humanity, God, and the Church and how the three relate.
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