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Jul 31, 2017dennismmiller rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
The protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, Major Henry Scobie, is an Assistant Commissioner of Police in an unnamed British African colony during the Second World War. Scobie is an honest, though not necessarily virtuous, man in a sink of corruption, but his apparent honesty only results in rumors of some secret, deeper, and more shameful corruption. Meanwhile, Scobie is unable to please either his superiors, who pass him over for promotion, or his wife Louise, who has been desperately unhappy since the death of their daughter, or the clandestine agent sent to investigate possible espionage, whose personal dislike of Scobie leads him to target the major, or the young widow with whom he begins an affair, but for whom he cannot leave his wife, or his God, to whom he is above all else responsible. In a novel as bleak and gloomy as the seemingly neverending rains, Greene painstakingly maps "the wide region of repentance and longing" as Scobie works out his damnation with fear and trembling. If such a thing is really possible.