But he convinces himself that by sacrificing his own life, he can spare both Helen and Louise further misery at his expense. Only one way of escape presents itself to Scobie, and he believes that eternal damnation awaits him if he chooses it. When Louise returns, hoping to restore their strained marriage, she suggests that they receive communion together, which requires a full confession, and the cage door swings shut on Scobie and his deceptions.
And once Louise is gone, Scobie begins an affair with the recently widowed Helen and soon finds himself responsible for the happiness of two people, rather than just of one. To raise the money to pay for his wife's passage, Scobie strikes a bargain with Yusef that leads to Scobie's corruption after many years of honest service. Though Scobie wonders if any human being can arrange another's happiness and even considers the desire to be happy in a world so filled with pain and suffering to be impossibly foolish, he still tries to make Louise happy. Thus begins a series of decisions and bargains that push Scobie into a terrifyingly unfamiliar moral terrain. She decides she must leave, and Henry makes a fateful promise to send her to South Africa, even though he lacks the funds to do so. When he is passed over for the job of Commissioner of Police, Louise feels humiliated in the eyes of the other British officers and their wives, and her unhappiness is brought to a fever pitch. And Henry Scobie is not a man who can bear the thought that he has caused another to suffer. Fed up with the ghastly climate, the remoteness, and, in her case, friendlessness of village life in Sierra Leone, Louise lets her husband know the full depth of her misery. Its plot, its psychological and spiritual depth, even its political intrigues turn around two basic moral questions: Is it possible to make others happy? Is suicide ever the right choice? The novel's enigmatic protagonist, police officer Henry Scobie, even wonders if Christ's death might be understood as an act of suicide, since He allowed Himself to be sacrificed.īefore he reaches the climactic decision of his own moral crisis, Scobie struggles to make his poetry-loving and deeply unhappy wife, Louise, happy.
But at its core-at the heart of The Heart of the Matter-it is a novel of moral dilemmas. Set in a small British colonial outpost in Sierra Leone during World War II, The Heart of the Matter occupies and comments on the ambitious subjects of war, espionage, love, adultery, treachery, and betrayal.
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