The amorous affairs of a British colony - weird by any measure - in The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (1943) takes a turn toward the weird in part 2 as GG shifts the focus to the complex love lives of the two counterbalanced protagonists, Scobie and Wilson (there are many "pairings" in this novel, including also the Syrian merchants Yusef and Tallit, the two beloved women, Louise and Helen, Wilson and Harris ... ). Scobie (police Major) is thrown into action as a large group of survivors of a torpedo attack - they had spent many horrendous days in lifeboats as water and food diminished - arrives in the British colony. Strangely, Scobie is smitten with one of the survivors, Helen, a woman of about 20 whose husband - they had been married only one month - dies in the attack. At first it seems she may die (a young boy dies in the infirmary as Scobie is reading to him; the nurse crudely reprimands him for wasting his time doing so), but she survives and gets access to government housing while waiting for passage back to England. She seems entirely indifferent to losing her young husband; we can only assume she's still in some kind of shock. Scobie assumes nothing, however, and spends a lot of time talking to her and eventually pretty quickly they become a couple; how he squares this with his Catholicism or with his own conscience - he's obviously taking advantage of a much younger, inexperienced, vulnerable woman - remains in doubt, at this point at least. Meanwhile, Wilson - whom we're now pretty sure is secretly in the colony to investigate diamond smuggling and police corruption associated w/ that - confronts Scobie about mistreatment of his (Scobie's) wife, Louise; Wilson threatens Scobie, then breaks down in tears - and Scobie is surprisingly sympathetic to Wilson. As in the earlier chapters, we see that it seems to take a burden off his mind when someone else is in love with his wife - perhaps that gives him the freedom to seek love and sex elsewhere (Wilson, in a great scene, seeks sex in the brothel near the police station). As for Wilson, he seems to yearn for the inapproachable and unavailable - mooning over Louise more in her absence than in her presence. He writes her a poem (bad and old-fashioned - this is 1942, not 1842), which he sends to his boarding-school newsletter for publication - how pathetic! - and he's "unmasked" by his roommate, Harris, who reads the magazine and decodes the poem's dedication. No doubt the amorous affairs of a remote British colony are every bit as weird and complex as Payton Place or Updike-land, but some of this seems perverse or at least weird by any measure. 


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