The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s great 1948 novel is set in a wartime, West African country and features Major Henry Scobie, a police commissioner, as its major character. I thought it was a brilliant novel, filmic in its sense of place and sympathetic and insightful about its main characters and their inter-relationships. The heat and humidity intrude on the people of this colonial outpost, affecting both their daily lives and their mental worlds. Greene’s Catholicism pervades the novel with its focus on religious belief, conscience, guilt and sin but these themes do not overpower the narrative, which held me in its grip all the way through. Excellent!