Book #12 The Heart Of The Matter by Graham Greene

The Heart Of The Matter

The Heart Of The Matter by Graham Greene was my Book Club's choice this month. It is the third Graham Greene novel I have read after The End Of The Affair and The Human Factor. Having read those novels, I had some idea of what to expect here, and indeed the novel shares a number of deep similarities to The End Of The Affair.

Having since googled this, four of Greene's novels, including Heart Of The Matter and End Of The Affair examined Catholic themes with Heart Of The Matter being the final one. Some at my Book Club could not understand why the protagonist becomes so deeply religious towards the end, but I, having grown up in modern Catholicism with an awareness of its history, could.

The unforgiving Catholicism on show here, in the days of the Tridentine Rite and prior to the Second Vatican Council is one I think not easily understood by a lay reader, which I think makes the book lose something in translation to the non-religious or non-Catholic.

Aside from this issue the novel covers a number of other themes. First and foremost it is a novel about Colonials and Colonial society. Various Brits abroad, largely public school educated, despairing of the heat and disparaging of the natives, illustrating as they go via their behaviour the levels to which the British Empire damaged various nations and their peoples with their sense of paternalistic right and entitlement.  

Our protagonist is Scobie, and our colony is a "West African State" later revealed by Greene to be Sierra Leone. Scobie is that rare thing, an honest man who likes the people and seeks to do the job well,  something which makes he and his wife objects of unpopularity and scorn. As the novel turns, and Scobie is forced to act in an unprincipled way, his popularity increases, a remark perhaps aimed by Greene at the corrupt nature of those who enter Foreign Service.

It is a very male book set in a man's world and I found myself frustrated that we only see women in this book in the way Scobie views them, as needy and a burden. The two main female characters Helen and Louise are two-dimensional with only merest hints that they are more than Scobie is allowing them to be. Other men like Wilson, Bagster and Harris are priggish and annoying, and perhaps in some respects, stereotypes.

Despite this the prose itself is engaging, though the novel does not really become consistently readable until perhaps mid-way through. It has dated, but is also an interesting portrait of its time, both historically speaking and in terms of comparative literature.

It is an interesting book, and I enjoyed certain lines of prose very much, but this being my third Greene, I feel like I've got a certain handle now on the type of novel he wrote and can't say I'm eager to read his complete works.

Verdict 7/10

Book #6 Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

 Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited, or rather Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred And Profane Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder to give it is proper title is a known "classic". Though it was mentioned by Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen on 'My Life In Books' I'm not someone eager to take reading recommendations from the foppish one off of Changing Rooms as snobby as that may sound. I think it was him anyway it could have been the Mitford sister. What I did think was 'Oh yes, Waugh, I keep meaning to read Waugh and never have' and so I downloaded Brideshead Revisited.

Captain Charles Ryder and his company come across a stately home whilst on exercise, encouraged to see it by one of his men he replies 'I've seen it before' and the rest of the story takes place as a flashback.
Early in his university career Ryder befriends Sebastian Flyte the second son of Lord Marchmain, a man living in exile in Italy, having left his staunchly Catholic wife. Flyte brings him to visit their home and from there Charles visits become regular and he becomes intricately linked to their family.

Brideshead Revisited is of course now forever associated with the Eighties TV adaptation starring Jeremy Irons & I have to say without knowledge of it I would have been hard pressed to know what causes Sebastian's decline, Waugh of course could not have made the reasons explicit in the era in which he wrote, and a small, subtle clue is only given by Ryder towards the end of the novel when he is involved in a relationship with Sebastian's sister.

Although I love the drawing room society culture of Nineteenth Century literature, like Austen say, there was something about Brideshead that I thought was elitist and off putting, I didn't really care about them and I found them rather shallow. At the conclusion of the book, after the final event that Ryder shares with the family, I closed the book and I said : "The lesson apparently in this novel is : Catholicism ruins lives!!!" which is a strange conclusion to make because Waugh was a committed Catholic and i'm not sure that's the moral of the tale he would  have wished readers to take.

I think its "worthy" as in worth reading but again, I was disappointed as I'd heard it and Waugh mentioned so often over the years that I'd hoped to sink into a book which would forever stay with me and become a book that I wouldn't want to end and that experience didn't happen for me. I feel like maybe I "missed something" as you often do when you don't love a classic. Shame, really. 6/10