January 2014: The Heart of the Matter (Greene)

Post date: Jan 17, 2015 11:45:8 PM

I have only read the first half of the book, so am not really the best person to be writing this up. However, here goes anyway. A good sized group met at Jane's on the evening of January 13 to discuss this work of Graham Greene, which we had chosen because it was touted by Obinze’s mother in Americanah, our October book club selection. I just looked up the reference, to see if I could find out what author Chimamande Ngozi Adichie likes about it so much. In this interview she is asked:

Interviewer: A few novels conspicuously appear in Americanah and act as counterpoints, notably Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, his 1948 novel about an English couple settling in—and coming apart—in Sierra Leone. Does Greene have special significance to you?

CnA: I love both novels. The Heart of the Matter is close to my idea of a perfect novel. It is beautifully written and has a wonderful grave quality.

By and large, although book club members agreed it had beautiful writing, none would have said it was a perfect novel. Katherine, who lived in Africa as a young woman while in the foreign service, remembered reading it at that time and finding it profoundly moving. She did not find it nearly so moving this time, and none of the other readers had that reaction either. We mused on the overall theme--failure, perhaps? and wondered about various plot twists, some of which were difficult to follow in the opinion of some readers. Overall, nobody could precisely figure out why it appears on various lists of the 100 best books.