Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Edition: Penguin, 1991
Review number: 506

West Africa in the Second World War was probably more remote from the rest of the world than at any time this century, a time when the war in the Atlantic made travel by ship extremely dangerous. European colonial staff in the area always felt isolated, and this feeling was increased by the war. It is this loneliness which forms the background to Graham Greene's novel, and it is heightened by attributes which separate the central character even from those of a similar background. Scobie is a senior policeman and a Catholic, as well as having a reputation for an unusually strong resistance to corruption; none of these qualities serve to make him popular amongst the other administrators in the British colony.

Duty is the central factor in Scobie's life: duty to his job, duty to his wife. Since his daughter died, there is little else left to him. Then he is passed over as a replacement for the retiring Commissioner of Police in favour of a younger man, and his wife starts to find remaining in the colony insupportable. He is able to arrange a passage to more cosmopolitan South Africa to give her some respite, but this means that he has to become indebted to one of the corrupt Syrian traders in the colony.. This begins his disintegration, which continues when he meets Helen Rolt, a refugee from a shipwreck, and begins an affair.

Interestingly, the more things go badly for Scobie and the further he puts himself from the church, the stronger his faith as a Catholic becomes. Despite believing himself damned as an adulterer, he is unable to break off the affair. Yet he had originally joined the church only because he wanted to marry a Catholic.

The Heart of the Matter is about loneliness: a lonely man in a lonely place, cut off by his religion from the only love he has experienced since the death of his daughter (which, though not part of the novel, is the defining moment of Scobie's life). As loneliness and alienation play an important part in modern life, The Heart of the Matter is truly a novel for our times.

Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966)

Edition: Bodley Head, 1966
Review number: 172

The Comedians is about three men, Smith, Jones and Brown, a shifty sounding set of names, as the narrator remarks. They meet on a ship bound for Papa Doc's Haiti, each travelling there for a very different reason. Brown, the main character and narrator, owns a hotel there which he has been trying to sell in the US because it has become a liability rather than an asset through the vagaries of the Duvalier regime; Smith and his wife are evangelists of vegetarianism, rich Americans who have a vision of a vegetarian centre in the Caribbean, possibly in Haiti; Jones is someone with a somewhat murky past, about whom the captain of the Medea has received warning telegrams.

Through their time in Haiti, each is shown to be, to some extent, playing a part and putting on a show. (This is the reason for the novel's title.)

The background of third world sleaze and corruption is something that Greene was a master at; imitators include Len Deighton (MAMista) and John le Carré (The Tailor of Panama), both of whom are perhaps rather heavy-handed by comparison. (A nineties thriller is perhaps expected to be more violent and sordid, which would also explain this difference.)

Graham Greene: Travels With My Aunt (1969)

Edition: Hamlyn
Review number: 147

Henry Pulling meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral, after many years without seeing her. Travels With My Aunt is the account of how she inexorably drags him into her strange, hedonistic lifestyle, a lifestyle more generally associated with teenagers than with a woman in her eighties and her retired bank manager nephew. In her company, he travels bemusedly, first to Istanbul on the Orient Express, becoming involved with drugs and currency smugglers. In Aunt Augusta, Greene has created one of the great eccentric characters of modern fiction, with a wry humourous touch. Travels With My Aunt reads like a gentler version of one of Joe Orton's plays.

The book - and, indeed, musical and film - it reminds me most strongly of is Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame and its sequel, Round the World With Auntie Mame. While both the main characters in these books are considerably younger than those in Travels With My Aunt (the narrator of Auntie Mame is, at the beginning, a schoolboy), the similarities are quite obvious. Since Auntie Mame was published in 1955 and Travels With My Aunt in 1969, it is likely that Greene at one point thought it would be fun to write a similar book but with the characters a lot older. There is certainly more pathos in a man of fifty discovering the world for the first time than there is in the similar experiences of a teenager.