The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Classics revisited: The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

The only kind of literary novel that one should bother with in 2026 is one that has God in it. Let’s face it: as a genre, the novel has had its day. No, I am not going to announce its death – the novel has been declared dead so many times the pallbearers are getting tired of being summoned. Certainly serious novels are still being read and reviewed, and the proliferation of book clubs, lit-fests, and reading communities would suggest there is, somewhere out there, a thriving literary culture. But the novel is no longer at the center of cultural discourse. The impetus for reading a long work of fiction does not seem to obtain anymore, and the number of readers choosing to engage with serious novels is dwindling; this is backed as much by statistics and by personal observations as, I will confess, by my own disenchantment with the genre. One’s own disenchantment should never be universalized, but it is hard not to feel that my feelings about the novel are part of a general trend. 

While I am familiar with the usual arguments advanced to explain why the novel should not be written off, I do not find any one especially convincing. There is nothing the novel can do that other genres, not to speak of media, can’t – and better. We live at a time that prizes the literal and the immediate; reality is not just stranger than fiction but, as the modern world has helped us discover, a lot more fascinating. As a result of the virtualization of life, escapism has shifted elsewhere, redefining itself and often becoming the reality of those more fortunate than us. Real life is a lot more inventive than any fecund imagination; modernity is so complex it is hard for a novel to do it justice. This would go a long way towards explaining why Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle became a literary sensation – it’s not really fiction. The real has also extended its dominion over the classics. Auto-da-Fé, the only novel Elias Canetti ever penned, is unreadable, but his autobiographical trilogy remains a riveting gem. Thomas Bernhard wrote more than a dozen novels; his memoir, Gathering Evidence, is the only Bernhard work I have revisited. And, however sacrilegious it may sound, I would recommend reading Dostoevsky’s The Diary of a Writer before any of his celebrated novels – in light of current events, it is a lot more edifying than The Brothers Karamazov or Notes from Underground. Of course, one shouldn’t be insensitive to the question of aesthetics, but wading through Proust last year I kept on wishing I were reading something else, and I know I am not the only one. As for Nabokov, that champion of art for art’s sake, his novels – novels that I once greedily devoured – now seem to exhale the cold, damp air of the catacombs. 

For a novel to be a compelling read, its theme must be as relevant to us as it was to someone circa 1400. The problems that bedevil its characters must also bedevil us; their dilemmas have to be our dilemmas; the stakes need to be very high. Such a novel must deal with eternity. But you can’t have eternity unless you bring God in, and while all classics purport to deal with the human condition, only those written by authors with an eye on the heavens have true lasting power. They are the ones that take aim at the heart of the matter, this being the title of one of Graham Greene’s key works. Now, Greene’s novels have not been immune to the personal disenchantment that I have been experiencing for some time and that plagues many other readers. The Quiet American, though rightly considered a classic, is overshadowed by the inane love triangle between a jaded Englishman, an American official with a hemorrhoidal name, and a Vietnamese woman utterly devoid of any complexity or depth. The indisputable merits of The Power and the Glory – another classic – cannot outweigh the sprawling tedium of its plot. But The Heart of the Matter is, well, a very different matter. Some eighty years since its publication, this masterpiece hasn’t just aged well; in a way, it shows no signs of ageing. Graham was a lot more than just a masterful storyteller; he was a writer with a religious outlook. Although he oxymoronically called himself a “Catholic atheist,” insisting he was not a religious author or the Vatican’s scribe, the personal beliefs of a serious, profound writer do not lend themselves to easy compartmentalization. Catholicism is featured prominently in his best works and serves as the backbone of The Heart of the Matter.

Christianity is prefigured in the novel’s epigraph, which is a quote from the French (and staunchly Catholic) man of letters Charles Péguy: “The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity . . . no one is as competent in matters of Christianity as the sinner. No one, that is, except a saint.” This gives us the measure of the protagonist. Major Henry Scobie is deputy commissioner of the police force in a British colony in West Africa (the exact place is never named; supposedly it is British Sierra Leone) during the Second World War. A Catholic convert like the author, Scobie is trying to stay clean in a fetid backwater where the heat, corruption, and cockroaches are relentless. He seems to be holding up well, but his wife is not. Louise reads poetry; she is also terribly concerned about what the gossipmongers will say at the local club. She desperately yearns to get away for a while and go to South Africa. Lacking the requisite means to sponsor the voyage, Scobie borrows funds from one of the shady Syrians in control of the local commerce. He is driven by the purest of intentions but, as we all know, the road to hell is littered with those. Still, some intentions are better than others. Scobie’s real loss of purity begins when he becomes romantically involved with a survivor from a torpedoed ship, a woman young enough to be his daughter. Faced with the prospect of making one of the two women unhappy, he settles on a solution that is meant to spare both but, according to Catholic doctrine, consigns him to eternal damnation. 

Calling the plot ridiculous, George Orwell wrote a scathing review of the novel in The New Yorker following its publication. While certain aspects of the review are judicious, Orwell is wrong in the main. “The central idea of the book,” he asserts, “is that it is better, spiritually higher, to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan.” This is not what the novel is about. It is about the difficulty involved in being a good Christian and the dilemmas confronting an individual who seeks to be one. With the necessary adjustments, these dilemmas are as real for Christians today as they were for early Christians, and perhaps even more so, since the modern world is defiantly secular and offers a panoply of temptations that were unfathomable at the dawn of Christianity. Consider the dilemma of a Christian investing in the stock market for his retirement. Ethical investing can weed out the obvious offenders – weapons manufacturers, tobacco companies, what have you. But what is one to do with oil producers that pollute the world, grocery conglomerates that collude to gouge consumers already besieged by rising prices, pharmaceutical giants with a string of lawsuits and scandals behind them, and behemoth retailers that outsource their jobs to zones with poor labour legislation? What about online retailers that destroy small mom-and-pop businesses, “disruptors” that shamelessly exploit their employees, and international purveyors of junk food that makes consumers obese? It’s not that Christians can’t have a stock portfolio – they have a right to build a nest egg for their retirement like anyone else – but good Christians might not always have one with an easy conscience. 

Scobie does not have a stock portfolio to speak of, just a lousy insurance policy to protect his wife. But his dilemmas are just as acute. During a routine search of the captain’s cabin on a ship early on in the novel, Scobie uncovers a letter from the captain to his daughter. The daughter is in Germany and, on account of the war, the letter must be forwarded to the authorities. But the letter is innocuous, and Scobie destroys it. Orwell views this contravention of regulations as Scobie’s first mistake on the road to perdition. But not all good deeds that litter the road to hell are equally pernicious. Scobie’s decision to spare the captain is a biblically inspired choice that places man above Saturday. The loan he obtains from the Syrian is a different matter. Scobie borrows the money because he is moved by pity for his wife, a woman he does not love but whom he once pledged to make happy. The motive is pure, but the ethics are more questionable – a police chief who borrows money from a man suspected of operating outside the law puts himself in a delicate situation. But it is not the loan that proves to be Scobie’s undoing; its terms are above board, and Scobie eventually discloses it to the commissioner. The real step towards perdition is his love affair with the young woman. Helen Rolt first appears in the novel as she is taken to a makeshift hospital on a stretcher, at which point she catches Scobie’s eye. But just before that, he spots a small girl who is also carried on a stretcher. The girl lost both of her parents when the ship was torpedoed, and she is not expected to live. Scobie reflects: 

It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that. Not that the child would die: that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different; but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat – that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. 

It is quite symbolic that Rolt enters his life just as Scobie is grappling with the question of theodicy, and it is when Scobie sees her that he is truly lost. At the end of the book, he turns his back on a church altar; figuratively, he already has. We read: 

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Scobie is not a good Christian (then again, who is?). But he is neither corrupt nor evil. Everything that he does he does out of pity. For Orwell, “Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together.” But show me a man whose two halves do fit together. Scobie would be more incredible if his involvement with Helen Rolt were driven by lust; in the event, it is pity that is at work here and not concupiscence (we are told Helen is unattractive and is something of a young version of Louise). It might sound improbable, but then, the reality whose logic Orwell applies to gauge Scobie’s motives can, as mentioned, be stranger than fiction, and as someone who once knew a Christian man so committed to the happiness of his loved ones he had ruined himself, I find Scobie perfectly believable. It is pity that Scobie carries in his heart; it is pity that’s at the heart of the matter. Beware of pity, the English title of one Stefan Zweig novel tells us, but Scobie is not much of a reader, and his pity ends up destroying him. Yet throughout he remains a man of goodwill. The question the novel asks is not whether Scobie is morally superior to virtuous pagans, as Orwell thinks, but whether God will find Scobie’s inherent goodness sufficiently redemptive to overlook his failure as a Christian. The words of a priest at the end of the book suggest the answer is “yes”; the Church, the priest says, doesn’t know what goes in a human heart. Presumably, nor does Orwell, unless the heart in question is his own. Pace Orwell, Péguy’s saying that serves as the epigraph does not mean that “ordinary human decency is of no value and that any one sin is no worse than any other sin,” but that sin is part of the human condition and that, just as an impoverished man who strikes it rich will have a keener appreciation of wealth than someone who has never known poverty, a sinner may have a better grasp of Christian virtue than someone who has never sinned.

There is a theatrical falseness about Scobie’s eventual “self-sacrifice,” particularly as he uses Jesus to confer moral legitimacy upon his decision (he argues that Jesus’s death on the cross was not murder – God can’t be murdered – but a public act of suicide). But his “self-sacrifice” is problematic only if it is placed exclusively in the domain of pity. It seems to me to be more than an expression of pity; it is also a judgment. A deeply believing Christian, even an erring one, will be his own worst judge. In Luke 17:21, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God is within us. Commenting on this verse, Saint Luke of Crimea, a 20th-century Russian Orthodox bishop who was later canonized, writes that by opening their hearts to the Holy Spirit and dedicating their lives to God, various saints were already living in God’s kingdom before their earthly death. Most people cannot attain this because they are too attached to the earthly kingdom – the stock market, metaphorically speaking. But we can go a step further. If God’s kingdom can be inside us, so can its opposite, and Scobie believes that this opposite has taken over his spirit. He hasn’t just committed adultery and taken communion in a state of mortal sin; he is also indirectly responsible for the death of his devoted young servant Ali. His final decision to take his own life can therefore be seen as a judgment. Whether it holds up to moral scrutiny from a Christian point of view, is a different story. 

Like any novel, The Heart of the Matter is not without its imperfections. The female characters lack substance – this applies as much to Scobie’s wife as to his mistress. The love affair between Scobie and Rolt is not well executed; Scobie’s all-encompassing pity aside, there seems to be no good reason for their May-December romance. Greene’s personal opinions are delivered as apodictic dictums – a problem in an age that puts a premium on relativism. The setting is quintessentially colonial: class snobbery at the local club, now-there-is-a-good-chap, pink gins at sundown, white man’s burden – while some readers will appreciate the setting’s lushness, others might find it jarring. But the serious charges against it – the ones you find in Orwell’s review – can be dropped without hesitation. That we find the novel sententious says more about us than it does about the novel. Greene reminds us that the world is a sick place:

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil – or else an absolute ignorance. 

Modern man does not like to hear that. We think happiness ought to be enshrined in the constitution and managed through an app; sin is to be dismissed as an artificial construct. Whatever smugness one might find in The Heart of the Matter pales in comparison with the smugness of modern secularism. Human nature does not change, and The Heart of the Matter reminds us of what happens when we yield to it. It reminds us that, for as long we are human, we will be led into temptations and face moral dilemmas that spawn personal crises, and while novels won’t tell us how to resolve them, they will give us the consolation of knowing that we are not alone. Above all, it reminds us that novels still have something to tell us – even in 2026.