My personal readathon this year tees off with “THE HEART OF THE MATTER” by Graham Greene. Greene is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. The Time publishing company opines that “No serious writer of the twentieth century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination as did Graham Greene”.
The story is set in Sierra Leone where Greene had worked as an MI6 agent during the second world war. The book weaves a rich chronicle of pre-independence corruption and perhaps would serve as a useful resource to parallel the enduring malaise of corruption and maladministration in Sierra Leone’s twenty-first century with that period. Without attempting any spoilers, this book is revealing of the many vestiges of social pressure which are often brought to bear on the lives of public servants and how they are not to negotiate them. I highly recommend this book for civil servants, policy and development experts, fiction lovers, students and for especially folks with appetite for creative writing. I believe Greene’s works greatly inspired Chimamanda’s masterpieces—Purple Hibiscus and Americanah—in the latter, Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter” is mentioned a few times.
Here’s my top-five favorite quotes from the “The Heart of the Matter”:
- They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered. (page 45)
- Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. (page 50)
- –that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness. (page 75)
- It’s better to sin seventy times and repent each time than sin once and never repent (page 203)
- I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. (page 218)