Recommendations
Books Like The Heart of the Matter
Best books to read after The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter is Greene's most Catholic novel — Major Scobie's impossible goodness leading him to a mortal sin committed out of mercy rather than malice. If the novel's moral intensity and its portrait of a man destroyed by his own compassion moved you, these books share its concern with the relationship between moral failure and spiritual consequence, its portrait of the colonial world as a site of spiritual crisis, and its conviction that pity is the most dangerous of the virtues.
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The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
The essential companion — Greene's most autobiographical novel and the clearest statement of his Catholic theology; Sarah Miles's impossible vow and its consequences give the clearest context for understanding the theological weight of what Scobie does in The Heart of the Matter
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Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
The essential predecessor in Greene's Catholic fiction — Pinkie's terrifying authentic Catholicism; the novel that most directly asks the theological questions The Heart of the Matter develops, and the companion that gives the Catholic framework The Heart of the Matter takes for granted
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
The companion masterpiece — the whisky priest in revolutionary Mexico, hunted and guilty and finally saintly; the other pole of Greene's Catholic fiction and the novel that most directly compares to The Heart of the Matter in its portrait of a flawed man destroyed by his own impossible goodness
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The essential predecessor in the tradition of the novel organized around guilt, conscience, and spiritual consequence — Raskolnikov's murder and its aftermath; the comparison between Dostoevsky's Orthodox Christianity and Greene's Catholicism shows the same moral intensity in two very different doctrinal frameworks
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Silence
by Shūsaku Endō
Endō's novel about a Jesuit priest in seventeenth-century Japan who is forced to apostatize by watching his converts tortured — the essential Japanese parallel to Greene's Catholic fiction; both are novels about what happens when a religious person is confronted with a moral situation that their faith cannot resolve through orthodoxy alone
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The Fall
by Albert Camus
Camus's monologue-novel about a man who watched a woman drown without intervening and has been constructing his confession ever since — the secular parallel to The Heart of the Matter; both are organized around a man destroyed by his own moral failure, but where Greene's Scobie is destroyed by too much pity, Camus's Clamence is destroyed by too little
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Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart
Stuart's Booker Prize-winning novel about a boy's devotion to his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow — the most recent important British novel in the tradition of compassion as destruction that The Heart of the Matter belongs to; both are organized around a character who cannot stop trying to save someone who cannot be saved
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A Burnt-Out Case
by Graham Greene
Greene's immediately following novel — Querry's flight to a remote Congo leper colony after the collapse of his faith in art; the essential companion in Greene's own development, showing what becomes of a man who has experienced the spiritual crisis of The Heart of the Matter and survived it into a kind of exhausted peace
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