Books: What Price Pity?

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THE HEART OF THE MATTER (306 pp.)—Graham Greene—Viking ($3).

Edward Wilson, secret agent of His Majesty's Government in World War II, sat on a hotel balcony and sourly surveyed the West African seaport to which he had been assigned. He saw row upon row of hot and hideous tin roofs sloping away toward the sea, and a ringing clang came to his ears as a vulture perched heavily on top of the hotel. Down at the quayside, pickaninnies swarmed like little vultures around a newly landed seaman and triumphantly escorted him to the local brothel.

Young Negro girls sat in the shade, "engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair"; a West Indian dandy traipsed through the squalid streets, sporting a feather boa. Then a white man, wearing a police uniform, hove into view—a squat, grey-haired man whom Wilson would barely have noticed if the Englishman at his elbow had not exclaimed: "Look . . . look at Scobie . . . Our great police force."

Thus Henry Scobie, leading man in The Heart of the Matter, is singled out as by a movie camera's swooping eye from the rest of the world; and readers of Graham Greene's previous novels will not have to read far in this one before they know that they have met Scobie and his world before. For this world, disguised though it is under African heat, is the same cruel, sordid, vulturous hell that Greene has conjured up in most of 14 books, and Hero Scobie is Greene's equally familiar creation—a sinner disguised as a hero-villain.

What makes The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most profound novel is that Henry Scobie, who seems to have one skin less than his tortured predecessors, actually has one more. In Brighton Rock (1938) Graham Greene drew a horrifying portrait of an adolescent Catholic named Pinkie, who was headed straight for damnation, and dimly, desperately knew it. In The Heart of the Matter he draws a man who is threatened with the same damnation, and sees it—apparently—much more clearly. Every man & woman, of whatever color, who has run into Scobie during his 15 years as Deputy Commissioner of Police, admires or despises him because, in a world of utter corruption, Policeman Scobie seems utterly incorruptible. What they do not know—what Scobie himself does not know at first—is that in order to feed his voracious sense of pity, Scobie is ready, if necessary, to break the most cherished laws of both Church & State.