Novel: The Heart of the Matter

Overview
Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter is a lean, unsparing moral and psychological study set in a small British colony in West Africa during the Second World War. The novel follows Major Henry Scobie, a middle-aged police officer whose outward steadiness hides a collapsing inner life. Greene probes the collision between duty, desire, faith, and despair, rendering a portrait of conscience under strain that expands into broader reflections on colonial order and human frailty.

Protagonist
Major Scobie is the novel's center: dutiful, courteous, and worn by years of service and a stifling domestic life. He is bound by loyalty to his post, a sense of obligation to others, and a strict personal code that mixes stoicism with a yearning for mercy. Loneliness and compassion make him vulnerable to a relationship that compromises his sense of right and gradually corrodes his standing both at home and at work.

Plot
Scobie's private crisis begins when he forms an intimate, illicit attachment to a younger woman whose warmth offers him solace from an unhappy marriage. The affair intensifies his sense of moral failure, yet he refuses to abandon either his lover or his responsibilities. Complications multiply when he becomes entangled in a legal and financial dilemma involving a bankrupt merchant, and Scobie makes secretive decisions intended to shield the vulnerable and preserve reputations. Those choices set off a chain of misunderstandings and pressures that make escape impossible. The narrative moves inexorably toward a tragic resolution as Scobie, overwhelmed by guilt, duty, and a crushing conviction that his actions have betrayed both God and man, decides on a final, irrevocable act.

Themes
The novel interrogates the meaning of conscience: what it demands, what it permits, and how religious belief can both comfort and condemn. Greene foregrounds the tension between law and compassion, showing how rigid adherence to one can devastate the other. Themes of loneliness, erotic longing, and the weight of small mercies recur, revealing how everyday kindness can become entanglement. The colonial setting intensifies moral ambiguity, as imperial systems of authority and bureaucracy provide the backdrop for personal failure and systemic blind spots.

Style and Tone
Greene's prose is spare, observant, and often haunted, with a moral seriousness that avoids sermonizing. Psychological detail is delivered economically, through gestures, interior reflection, and quiet scenes that disclose Scobie's contradictions. The atmosphere is claustrophobic: heat, isolation, and the moral fog of wartime amplify the characters' emotional states. Greene mixes dark irony with compassion, allowing readers to see Scobie's nobility and his self-deceptions in the same breath.

Legacy
The Heart of the Matter is often ranked among Greene's finest novels for its moral acuity and intensity of feeling. Critics and readers have praised its interrogation of faith, guilt, and duty and its powerful depiction of a man destroyed as much by kindness as by sin. Its ending, harrowing and inevitable, leaves lingering questions about responsibility, redemption, and the human heart's capacity for both cruelty and tenderness.