39 pages • 1 hour read
Graham GreeneThe Heart of the Matter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 2, Parts 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Parts 2-3 Summary
Returning from Lagos and no longer in a hotel, Wilson talks with Harris in their new Nissen hut owned by the Government. Harris laments that there may not be cockroaches to battle in the Government huts. Among Wilson’s things, Harris finds a copy of The Downhamian, the alumni newsletter of the Downhamian boarding school that both Wilson and Harris attended. Leafing through its pages, Harris finds a poem dedicated to “L.S.” and initialed at the foot by “E.W.” Harris makes an offhand comment about the poem to which Wilson becomes irate and filled with embarrassment and self-loathing. Wilson lies to Harris and reiterates that he doesn’t read poetry. Later, Wilson wonders about the “madness” (154) that induced him to compose the poem and how he has spent a lifetime deceiving and lying to people without remorse.
Meanwhile, Scobie and Helen are now embroiled in a passionate sexual affair. They have a conversation that descends into vehement fighting. Helen accuses Scobie of hypocrisy for being too Catholic to divorce Louise, but not too Catholic to have an adulterous affair. Scobie thinks that he has “underrated her power of giving pain” (163). Helen kicks Scobie out of her Nissen hut and tells him never to return. Scobie returns home and writes Helen a letter proclaiming that he loves her more than Louise and even God. Later, after the Commissioner confirms Scobie’s suspicions that Wilson is a spy for the colonial administration investigating Scobie’s unit for corruption, Scobie returns to Helen’s hut. Helen is overjoyed that he ignored her instructions to stay away. Scobie proceeds to ask Helen about the letter, but she says she never received it.
Although he disguises it, Scobie is concerned about the missing telegram to Helen. Returning home, he discovers that Louise has written a telegram to him announcing her imminent return, adding that her sojourn to South Africa was a mistake and she loves him dearly. Scobie feels nauseous and considers suicide. He wonders whether the murder of Christ was actually suicide and no different from Pemberton’s. Suppressing his emotions, he reflects on his responsibility to two people—Helen and Louise—before writing in his diary matter-of-factly about his visit to Helen’s and Louise’s telegram.
At a dinner party, Helen becomes irascible at the knowledge of Louise’s return. Wilson observes their fight, but Helen plays it off, joking that she and Scobie are engaged in a “scene of unbridled passion” (18). Scobie returns home to find Yusef waiting for him. Yusef reveals that he has Scobie’s love letter to Helen in his possession and attempts to blackmail Scobie. Scobie complies with Yusef’s request to give the captain of the Esperança a package, under the guise that the package is of military importance.
Book 2, Parts 2-3 Analysis
One of the more inconspicuous but compelling themes of The Heart of the Matter is the unreliable nature of writing. Many of the characters, including Scobie, Wilson, Louise, and the bank manager Robinson, opine on the utility of reading and words themselves. Scobie makes it a point to disavow the kinds of literary books Louise reads, preferring instead prosaic and overly factual diary-writing. Scobie’s banal diary entries prove essential to his plan to disguise his eventual suicide as a death by heart illness. But Scobie’s diary, consisting of mundane, factual details of his life, reveals nothing about what Greene calls the heart of the matter. Readers are only given access to Scobie’s emotional depth through his psyche, which he represses for public appearances and out of a misguided sense of duty and responsibility. Scobie’s moments of introspection involving his quest for spiritual and moral truth often end abruptly through matter-of-fact but cryptic diary entries.
The superficiality of the written word is also evidenced by Helen’s letters riddled with spelling errors, stolen letters, censored correspondence, and non-chronological telegram communications. These items lend themselves to the religious themes of The Heart of the Matter. Central to the novel’s questioning of true religion is whether the Catholic faith is too based in the wording of various laws and doctrines. As the critic James Wood writes in the Introduction, Greene himself was a convert from Protestantism and an adherent to “anti-institutional Catholicism” (XV).
The anti-institutional bent of the novel will become clearer through Father Rank’s admissions, but the twin themes of the nature of the written word and truth telling are intertwined through Greene’s interrogation of the history of Christianity and, more precisely, the Reformation. The Reformation was a response to clerical despotism and rigid hierarchical structures within the Catholic church. These structures, including legal and theological strictures, were for the Reformationists an impediment to individual, personal belief. Fundamental to this conflict was the nature of scripture and how to interpret it. Similarly, The Heart of the Matter asks questions about truth and language. Scobie’s explorations of religion take a blasphemous turn in the form of a God complex. In his ultimate act of heresy, Scobie’s rationalizes suicide, the “unforgivable sin,” as sanctioned through the self-sacrifice of Christ. Scobie thinks, “The priests told one [suicide] was [...] the final expression of an unrepentant despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teachings. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws” (174). Scobie’s interrogations are both heretical and anti-institutional, with unclear implications for believers who depend on God’s mercy and forgiveness.
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