Graham Greene The Heart of the Matter

About The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (1948) is his most Catholic novel — the story of Major Scobie, a colonial police officer in West Africa during the Second World War whose pity for everyone around him makes him incapable of refusing any claim on his compassion. Scobie's inability to stop doing good eventually leads him to a mortal sin he commits out of mercy rather than malice: taking communion while in unconfessed adultery. One of the great novels of spiritual damnation in English literature.