Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, 242 pages

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 able to please neither his superiors, who pass him over for promotion, nor his wife Louise, who has been desperately unhappy since the death of their daughter, nor the clandestine agent sent to investigate possible espionage, whose personal dislike of Scobie leads him to target the major, nor the young widow with whom he begins an affair, but for whom he cannot leave his wife, nor 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.