Chapter II The "Trilogy" : The Seeds of PoHtical Significance

The three novels, Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940) and The

Heart of the Matter (1948), often called the "Trilogy", are important as they caiTy the seeds of

Greene's political commitment in one fomi or the other, though they are chiefly concerned with

theological inatters of sin and guilt, the good and the evil. These three novels, taken together, show

Greene's "affection for the primitive" (R.W.B. Lewis 50).

Brighton Rock, to begin with, is Greene's important and popular novel. It is a crime thriller

which uses the mechanism of the old-fashioned tale of crime and adventure to focus on the

frightening state of the world. In The Modern Writer and His world, GS. Fraser says :

...the 1930s forced the writer's attention back on the intractable public world around him. In 1929, the great Wall Street slump had disastrous repercussions everywhere in Europe. Unemployment and social distress, as well as militant nationalism, brought Hitlerto power in Germany. ...A young man not only of the working class but also of the middle class grew up in the 1930s with no certain prospect of a job in front of him, with an all too probable chance of being caught up in another major war, with social distress and economic stagnation all around him (Fraser 131-132).

The dark world of Brighton, seen in this context, is an extension of the world in those times.

Behind the facade of the sunshine, music and gaiety lies a world of pain and death. Greene uses

vivid images to describe the seediness of the place as the flapping gutters, the glassless windows,

rotting discoloured faces, the basin full of stale water, the rotten banister, the chipped ewer, insects

buzzing through stale air, the breadcmmbs on the bed, etc. These images cumulatively build up a

general picture of a squalid, m.isshapen and decayin.g world. The novelist's focus is on the cn'minal

world where razors slash, gangs operate and fight, people are mui-dered to seek revenge and rules

and laws are challenged and scoffed at openly. For example, the whole place called Old Steyne,

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as observed by the protagonist l^inkie, is repulsive, sordid and decaying:

The streets narrowed upliill above the Steyne ; the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped forever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back... The Salvation Army Citadel... The Albert Hostel... a flapping gutter, cracked windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a tabletop. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts; the children played about the steep slope of rubble; a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. {Brighton Rock 153)

War has left its indelible marks on everything. Political institutions have been rendered

ineffective. There is chaos and lawlessness in society. In the dacaying and gloomy atmosphere of

utter poverty and deprivation there is no hope. It is a fit place to nurture gangsters, criminals,

emotional cripples and ruthless cynics. It is easy for a way\\'ard youngman to break the law and

defy social norms and customs.

In Brighton Rock, Greene's sympathies are clearly with the demoralised,

unemployed poor, even if they are on the path of evil, and his commitment is to the

suffering humanity at large. The novel tells the story of Pinkie Brown, called the Boy, a

seventeen-year-old Catholic boy, the representative of those who might have been good

with a big "if. He is a native of a slum area called Nelson Place. He is the product of the

dark environment which has crippled him for life. Two things strike us abut him at once :

his sexually perverted nature and his loneliness. Most of his troubles lie in his unhappy

childhood. In loneliness and misery he is akin to Andrews in Greene's The Man Within

(1929), Antony Farrant \n England Made Me (1934), Raven \nA Gun for Sale (1936)

and Phillip in the short story 'The Basement Room' (1935). Like them, he is unable to

22

seek pleasure in normal life because he has lost the meaning of happiness. He naturally

slips into the world of crime.

When the novel opens Pinkie is found seeking revenge for the murder of his leader,

Kite, who was betrayed by Fred Hale to Colleoni, another successful racketeer. In order

to ensure his safety, Hale tries to find someone who could stay with him. He is able to

pick up Ira Arnold in whom he finds a faithful friend. But he fails to stop the inevitable, in

the few minutes while Ida is tidying up in Hale's room, Hale is killed. Pinkie kills him

perhaps by pushing a stick of the hard red-and-white candy known as Brighton Rock

down his throat. The scene is not described. The post-mortem reveals that Hale died of a

heart attack.

Though Hale's death is viewed as natural, Ida Arnold has her own doubts. She is

determined to find out the murderer and hand him over to the law. She emerges as an

amateur detective and she detenninedly follows Pinkie. Pinkie, the Boy, commits some

other murders to cover up his crime. He realizes that his safety lies in marrying a sixteen-

year-old waitress. Rose, who might give evidence against him. Ida also comes to know

of Rose's value in getting the culprit nabbed.

The Boy becomes desperate as he feels cornered by Ida. He mairies Rose officially, but

gets more and more alienated and pathetic. At the end he is left with only two alternatives : a

covv'ardly surrender to the police, or voluntaiy death. He chooses the latter and offers a suicide

pact to Rose who agrees in the first place but then comes out of it. However, the Boy, blinded by

his ov qi vitriol, jumps from a cliff to his deatli.

The action of the novel, thus, moves in two converging lines : Pinkie's attempts to

save himself by ensuring Rose's silence; and Ida's pursuit of her friend's murderer and

her endeavour to save Rose from Pinkie.

The narrator's focus remains on the Boy who is Hitler-type, inexplicable, cruel, inhuman

and almost cynical. Like many protagonists of Greene, he is the embodiment of the Evil. Poor

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and lonely, he escapes from the harshness and misery of his childhood world, a slum area of

Brighton, into tiie world of crime and violence. He feels lost for ever, and importantly has no sense

of shame or regret about it.

Whatever happens to a child in his early life is sufficient to condition his whole life.

Pessimism and violence are the direct outcome of early corruption of the mind. This is

manifest in the case of the Boy. This secure world of innocence is shattered when he

happens to watch the love making of his parents on Saturday nights. The narrator tells us

how he felt on one such Saturday night:

and then (he) heard the stealthy movement of his parents on the

bed. It was Saturday night. His father panted like a man at the end

of a race and his mother made a horrifying sound of pleasurable

pain. He was filled with hatred, disgust, loneliness : he was

completely abandoned... {BR 186)

The effect of this scene on Pinkie's mind was far-reaching. His innocent mind interpreted

the incident in his own way. He comes to feel that he is no longer the centre of attention and an

object of affection in his parents' world. He thinks that his parents have abandoned him to indulge

in their passion. He comes to the perverted conclusion that what matters is one's self.

From this childhood experience Pinkie comes to hate sex. Sex, for him, becomes 'dirty

something'. His mind is filled with disgust. Love and sex lose all sanctity for him, though after

physical union with Rose, he is forced to change his opinion somewhat. A glimpse of Rose's thigh

makes him feel sick at one point:

He didn't want that relationship with anyone : the double bed, the

intimacy, it sickened him like the idea of age... To marry-it was like

odour on the hands. {BR 132)

Just before his maiTiage, he is in a very bad mood. His friend Dallow finds his behaviour

quite erratic. When he refers to flowers and bees. Pinkie gets unnecessarily provoked :

24

M know the rules ail right', the Boy said.

'What rules?'

'You can't teach me the rules', the Boy went on with gusty anger.

'1 watched 'em every Sturday night, didn't 1 ? Bouncing and

ploughing.' His eyes flinched as if he were watching some horror.

He said in a low voice, 'When I was a kid, 1 swore I'd be a priest'.

(BR 181)

It clearly reveals that Pinkie is never ready for married life because it involves sex

which reminds him of his childhood experience. His wish to become a priest is his negation

of conjugal life which a normal human being is supposed to lead. If he is getting married,

he is doing so with a selfish motive.

If, on the one hand, Pinkie's childhood confrontation with the adult comiption makes him

abnormal, the impersonal attitude of Brighton society, on the other, instils in him a sense of

corroding loneliness which turns him into a hardened outlaw. He becomes non-conformist. He

comes to believe that society has nothing to offer him. No wonder, he finds himself lost. Even

the gay side of Brighton fails to cheer him up. Like his boss, Fred Hale, he can only feel the

hideous loneliness of his childhood-a loneliness which he carries wherever he goes.

Significantly, it is in his state of loneliness that Pinkie feels the need for identification and

selfliood. However damned one is, one canot bear the humiliation of neglect and isolation. When

he is told by the police inspector that he is too young to run a racket, he feels insulted. His ego is

biTJtally hull:

There was poison in his veins, though he grinned and bore it. He

had been insulted. They thought because he was only seventeen...

he jerked his narrow shoulders back at the memory that he'd killed

his man.... he trailed the clouds of his own glory after him : hell lay

about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths. (BR 68)

This passage gives a vital clue to Pinkie's personality. Pinkie's pride impels him to show to

the world that he is not weak. He feels some kind of action - more crimes in his range of thinking

25

- is required to show his manhood. He has come to have repulsion for dull life. He chooses to live

a horrifying but a meaningful life.

Pinkie's relationship with Rose, a Roman catholic girl of sixteen, a waitress by profession,

is central to the scheme of Brighton Rock. In their relationship, the contraries are brought

together to reveal the complexity of life itself Rose finds the Kolley Kibber card left under a

table cloth in Snow's restaurant by Fred Hale, the gangster murdered by Pinkie. It is this card

which brings Rose close to Pinkie. She feels attracted to him. In all her innocence and ignorance

she comes to love him completely. Her selfless love and mairiage "initiate her into a world of

coiTuption which absorbs her quickly" (Kulshrestha 66).

If Rose is sincere. Pinkie is totally selfish, and their relationship is doomed from the

beginning. Pinkie feels that Rose may pose a danger to his security if she ever testifies against

him. When Rose, showing him the paper left by Hale, asks him if she should take this to the

police, he is horrified :

The ingenuousness - or the shrewdness - of the question shocked

him. Could one ever be safe with someone who realized so little

how she had got mixed up in things ? He said, 'You got to mind your

step', and thought with dull and tired distaste (it had been the hell of

a day): 1 shall have to marry her after all. He managed a smile :

those muscles were beginning to work. He said, 'Listen. You don't

need to think about those things. I'm going to marry you. There are

ways of geUing round the law'.

'Why bother about the law ?'

'I don't want any loose talk. Only marriage', he said with feigned

anger, 'will do for me. We got to be married properly'. {BR 151)

The passage reveals that Pinkie is not in love with Rose. If he thinks of marrying her, it is

only out of fear for his own security. One thing is clear that he is afraid of the law. If the law

catches him, he will be tortured and hanged. And this fate he wants to escape by marrying

26

Rose. One wonders why he does not think of silencing her by kiUing her. A criminal like him,

who has committed murders to save himself, could have easily thought of this easy solution. If he

does not, it speaks for his humanity hidden somewhere. He is somehow fascinated by Rose's

innocence, if not by iier love. He caruiot let innocence perish if there is a way out, but he does

not come to a point where he could feel genuine love for the innocent girl.

The meeting between Pinkie and Rose's parents shows how much the allurement of money

is degrading and how much the money-power is coirupting. Rose's father at first refuses to let

Pinkie many her. But the way Pinkie allures him with the offer often pounds makes him relent:

'I've come to do business', the Boy said, 'If you don't want 'to do

business—' He looked round the battered and hopeless room. 'I

thought maybe ten pounds would be of use to you\ and he saw

swimming up through the blind vindictive silence incredulity, avarice,

suspicion. 'We don't want—' the man began again and then gave

out like a gramophone. He began to think: you could see the thoughts

bob up one after another. (BR 155)

Rose's threat to walk out with Pinkie does the trick and her father gives in. Ten pounds are

enough to give up all her fatherly concern about the future of his daughter, though he still

feigns to keep the facade :

'Stop a moment. Stop a moment', the man said. 'You be quiet, mother'. He said to the Boy, 'We couldn't let Rose go not for ten nicker-not to a stranger. How do we know you'd treat her right ?' {BR 155)

Any other man in love would have given a hearty assurance to the man to dispel all

doubts, but not Pinkie. In a blunt, business-like tone he says : 'I'll give you twelve' {BR 155),

and then raises the bribe-money in fifteen pounds. He is finally able to exploit the situation

to his advantage. When he turns to Rose, he realizes that her parents have no virtue-

heroic patience or heroic endurance - which good people are supposed to display on such

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occasions. As Rose comes out with him and expresses his gratitude to him, lie feels far from

pleased. The prospect of having her as his wife and satisfying her carnal desire fills his mind

with disgust:

'You were wonderful', she said, loving him among the lavatory

smells, but her praise was poison : it marked her possession of

him : it led straight to what she expected from him, the horrifying

act of a desire he didn't feel. She followed him out into the fresh air

of Nelson Place. The children played among the ruins of Paradise

Piece, and a wind blew from the sea across the site of his home. A

dim desire for annihilation stretched in him : the vast superiority of

vacancy. (BR 156)

The passage is remarkable in exposing Pinkie's perpetual burden of an appalling

emptiness. It is because of his alienated position engendered by his childhood experience of

sexual act that he is possessed of destructive instincts. He cannot let himself go in the act of

love, as Rose can. In the company of Rose, after having won her from her parents, he feels

'a dim desire for annihilation' and a sense of superiority of his emptiness. He is obviously on the

self-destmctive patli.

What Pinkie values is his freedom. If he has decided to marry Rose, it is purely out of

selfish reasons. The word 'marriage' comes to him as a burden. In order to keep his conscience

clear he does not arrange the man'iage in a church. A simple signing ceremony at the registrar's

is enough for him to silence Rose as his wife. His attitude towards Rose remains more or less

formal, towards marriage disdainful, and towards honeymoon repulsive. After their man'iage,

his mind is filled with disgust:

They walked a foot apart along the pavement. Her words scratched

tentatively at the barrier like a bird's claws on a window pane. He

could feel her all the time trying to get at him; even her humility

seemed to him a trap. The crude quick ceremony was a claim on

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him. She didn't i<now the reason; she thought - God save the mark

- he wanted her. He said roughly, 'You needn't thinl< there's going

to be a honeymoon. That nonsense. I'm busy'. {BR 189).

The perversity of his mind is clear from the message he records for her on a gramophone -

'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home for ever and let me be ?' {BR 193).

This message is heard by Rose at a later stage, when he is gone for ever.

The relationship between Pinkie and Rose brings to the fore the fact that in Pinkie there

is a strong desire for the affirmation of the self. In order to affirm that he is unique in the

existential sense, he does not mind maltreating others and even inflicting cruelty on those who

love him. The pain that he infiicts on himself and others is for him a way to assert his freedom

as also a way to live life intensely. He feels that if he accepts any curb on his freedom it would

mean he was leading an unreal life. In his own way, he tries to prove again and again that he is

authentic, regardless of what he does and what he chooses.

Seen in this context, we find that his harshness towards Rose is justified. He fears that the

presence of Rose in his life means an assault on his privacy and his freedom, which he cannot

lose at any cost. When Rose, for example, finds his room in a mess and offers to tidy it the next

day, his reaction is sudden and provocative:

'You won't touch a thing', he said. 'It's my home, do you hear ? 1

won't have you coming in, changing things...' He watched her with

fear - to come into your own room, your cave, and find a strange

thing there... (5/? 197).

In Pinkie's world, even after her mairiage. Rose is a stranger. But in spite of having different

kinds of feelings, they consummate their marriage. In the beginning. Pinkie's only purpose is to

'conquer' Rose, but when, after the act, he looks back he no longer feels any sense of triumph

or superiority. The sexual act which was always repulsive to him seems now not-so-bad an

experience. He feels "momentarily exhilarated by the strangeness of his experience" {BR 203),

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and realizes that Rose loves him, whatever that means. However, he is suddenly frightened at

the prospect of losing his freedom :

The truth came home to him with horror that he had got to keep her

love for a lifetime; he would never be able to discard her. If he

climbed he had to take Nelson Place with him like a visible scar;

the registry office marriage was as irrevocable as a sacrament.

Only death could ever set him free. (BR 203).

The passage reiterates Pinkie's strong desire for freedom and individuality. After having a

horrifying thought of losing his freedom, his going out in the open at night in the darkness is an

objective correlative of his stifling feelings in his room where he has lost his freedom to Rose. A

short walk on the road helps him recover a bit:

The air was fresh like country air. He could imagine he had

escaped. He put his hands for warmth into his trouser-pockets and

felt a scrap of paper which should not have been there. He drew it

out - a scrap torn from a notebook - big, unformed, stranger's

writing. He held it up into the grey light and read - with difficult)'. '1

love you Pinkie. I don't care what you do. I love you for ever.

You've been good to me. Wherever you go, I'll go too'. (BR 204).

This scene is important in many ways. In the first place, it reveals that Pinkie can no longer

enjoy his so-called freedom wherever he goes. Rose will continue to register her presence in

one way or the other. She is now an inseparable part of Pinkie's life. Secondly, the passage

reveals the unselfish and undemanding nature of Rose's love for Pinkie. She has completely

surrendered herself in love. She is no longer the master of her own life. She is ready to be

controlled and directed.

What happens towards the end of this scene is no less significant. After having read the

love-note, Pinkie, in his usual disgust, is about to throw the paper in a dustbin, but something

30

holds his hand and he puts it back into his pocket, puiely out of selfish reason. But then somediing

unusual happens:

He heard a whisper, looked sharply round, and thrust the paper

back. In an alley between two shops, an old woman sat upon the

ground; he could just see the rotting and discoloured face : it was

like the sight of damnation. Then he heard the whisper, 'Blessed art

thou among women', saw the grey fingers fumbling at the beads.

This was not one of the damned; he watched with horrified

fascination : this was one of the saved. (BR 204)

For a moment perhaps Pinkie experiences an epiphcnic moment, the significance of which is

not yet clear to him. It is through the depiction of such rare moments of'supernatural' experiences

that Greene shows his commitment to the hidden humanit)' in his lost protagonists. He wants to

show that after all even a criminal had his soul-ful moments, that he would have been a different

human being in a better socio-political set up. At one point, Pinkie tluows a distui-bing question to

the set-up:

A brain was capable only of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of

. the cement school play-ground, the dead fire and the dying man in the St. Pancras waiting room, his bed at Bill's and his parents' bed. An awful resentment stirred in him - why shouldn't he have had his chance like all the rest, seen his glimpse of Heaven if it was only a crack between the Brighton wall ? (BR 306).

What Greene has suggested is that Pinkie was trapped in circumstances, created by

political and social institutions, in which he could not but choose evil. Once he was in, he could

not escape. Pinkie's crimes against the society and the establishment include Hale's and

Spicer's murders and the suicide pact to get rid of Rose and some other acts of cruelty. They

reveal his e\'i! natiu'c.

What distinguishes Pinkie from other peUy criminals is that he is acutely conscious of the

evil side of his character, which accounts for his angsl. He is conscious more of Hell and

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damnation than of Heaven and Salvation. He knows that he is dainned and is beyond redemption.

He accepts this fact with amazing stoicism :

A curious and cruel pleasure touched him - he didn't really care so

very much - it was being decided for him, and all he had to do was

to let himself easily go. He knew what the end might be - it didn't

horrify him : it was easier than life. (BR 2.27)

However, it does not mean that he is free from anguish about his fall and end. He was

once in a choir and desired to be a priest. He can recall snatches of a liturgy, which he utters

in a spoih voice. Music brings tears into his eyes and makes him visualize a scene of freedom

and happiness that could have been his in different circumstances:

He felt constriction and saw - hopelessly out of reach - a limitless

freedom : no fear, no hatred, no envy. It was as if he were dead

and were remembering the effect of a good confession, the

words of absolution; but being dead it was a memory only - he

couldn't experience contrition - the ribs of his body were like steel

bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance. (5/? 239-240)

As Pinkie moves on to the path of damnation, in the words of R.W.B. Lewis, "the tragic

dimension of Brighton Rock turns into a sort of saint's life in reverse" (Lewis 56). Pinkie goes on

committing sin after sin, the last of which are a matrimonial sacrilege and suicide, but remains

awfully conscious of them.

If Pinkie is an embodiment of evil, Rose is a symbol of good, and their union is a tragic

union of irreconcilables. Pinkie realizes that the evil in him needs to be complemented by the

good in Rose:

What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn't get along without goodness... she was good, he's discovered that, and he was damned; they were made for each other. (BR 167-168).

32

Strangely, thus, good and evil meet in Brighton Rock not to fight each other out, but to

ti-atemise. Both Pinkie and Rose, by marrying outside the church, have united themselves into a

sinful bond." 'There's not a pin to choose between us'", Pinkie remarks, to which Rose adds:"

'Not a pin'" (57? 202).

Though Rose is innocent and virtuous, it is surprising that she accepts her new

world of corruption quickly. Lawrence Lerner, like many critics, seems to doubt her

innocence : "Though she has no knowledge of evil in herself, she understands it, and her

goodness does not cut her off from experience" (Lerner 225). She is too headstrong and self-

willed to accept that she has been trapped by the evil. Out of her selfless love she accepts the fact

of Pinkie and his damnation. He finds her owai fate not different from Pinkie's:

He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them.

They couldn't damn him without damning her too... She wouldn't let

him go into that darkness alone. {BR 307)

hi Brighton Rock, we have a constant conflict between religious values and secular values.

Ida persuades Rose to get away fi-om Pinkie:

He doesn't care for you... I'm not a Puritan, mind, I've done a thing

or two in my time... But I've always been on the side of Right. You

are young. That's what it is... I was like you once. You'll grow out

of it. Ail you need is a bit of experience. {BR 131-132)

It is interesting to contrast the world of Pinkie and Rose with Ida Arnold's. Ida remains pre­

occupied with 'right" and 'wrong', whereas Pinkie and Rose with 'good' and 'evil'. Ida is

representative of the material world. She is good-natured, cheerfijl and pleasure-seeking, as noticed

by the sergeant:

Her large clear eye told nothing ... You could only guess.

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at the goods behind : the sound old-fashioned hall-marked goods,

justice, an eye for an eye, law and order, capital punishment, a bit of

fun now and then, nothing nasty, nothing shady, nothing you'd be

ashamed to own, nothing mysterious. (M 81)

Though morally she seems to be con-ect, her world is hollow, sterile and heartless. R. W.B.

Lewis evinces how Greene comes to prefer and even honour the naixow and oppressive world of

Pinkie over the spiritual bourgeoisie of Ida:

...the final wordiy victory of Ida, her destruction of Pinkie, coincides

with a hidden defeat of her own world : a repudiation of it,

accomplished relentlessly by the rhetoric of the book. That

rhetoric aims at separating out and then destorying the moral domain,

in the name of the theological. {Lewis 57).

Greene deliberately uses contradictory terms to undermine the moral world represented by

Ida. Such oxymorons as Ida's 'remorseless optimism' or her 'merciless compassion' are

intended to negate the common human virtues in contrast with the religious virtues like

penitent humility and mercy. The adjectives come to deny all value to the nouns. This verbal

technique is thus Greene's way to uphold the world of Pinkie, perhaps because of his

unconscious sympathy with a man who is what he is because of the corrupt milieu of which

he is a tiny part. Ida may be ethically better but Greene seems to think that ethical is much

further from the good than evil is, as he has dramatised in many of his works.

At many points in Brighton Rock, Greene seems to suggest that what matters is good and

evil, and not right and wi-ong. Rose admits silently that she knows nothing of llie two words - right

and wrong:

...the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods - Good and Evil. The woman could tell her nothing she didn't know about these -

34

she knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evil -

what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong ?

(57? 217).

Pinkie and Rose are aware of eternity and the larger isses of salvation and damnation.

We feel that Ida, with all her complacent vulgarity' and her jolly, good humoured sensuality, is

something less than human. We are made to believe that the world of Rose and Pinkie is

superior to that of Ida Arnold, and that both are better human beings than Ida.

Towards the end Greene shows that when there is no choice, it is heroic to embrace

death. Pinkie blinds himself like Oedipus and slips into "zero-nothing" {BR 264). It is through

death that Pinkie affirms that death is only an event in human life. What the priest tells Rose

about a Frenchman, named Charles Peguy, is tine in Pinkie's case too :

He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin through all his

life because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul should suffer

damnation ...He never look the sacraments. He never married his

wife in Church. I don't know, my child, but some people think he

was... well, a saint. {BR 268).

What the priest wants to convey is that God's ways are incomprehensible, and that even a simier

is not beyond His mercy which sometimes operates in mysterious and iirational ways. When Rose

tells the priest that Pinkie was a Catholic, the priest remarks:

Corruptiooptimi est pessima... I mean-a Catholic is more capable

of evil than anyone. I think perhaps because we believe in him -

wc are more in toucli witli the devil than oilier people. {BR 268).

It is, of course, a controversial view. Whether Pinkie is damned or not, and whether he is

capable of invoking God's favour by defying him, the metaphysic of Brighton Rock is unclear.

Unlike Pinkie, Rose makes a definite move towards salvation, first by refusing to kill

herself, as suggested by Pinkie, and then by approaching a priest for absolution. The baby in

35

her womb, as she thinks, is a symbol of her love for Pinkie, and she is sure, at this stage, of

Pinkie's for her. The words of the priest - 'If he loved you... that shows there was some good...'

{BR 268) - are significant. Rose's allusion is bound to get shattered on hearing Pinkie's

message on the phonograph record - 'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back

home for ever and let me be' {BR 193). She is going home to experience the worst horror of

her life.

It is clear that Pinkie had never really loved Rose, and was, in fact, incapable of love. But

then there are subtle hints in the text to show that he might have come to feel some kind of

tenderness towards Rose-for example, he never thinks of eliminating her on his O\\TI, experiences

some rare moments of pleasure in her company and defends her honour even at the cost of

offending his companions-in-crime.

Brighton Rock, a complex book with its theological concerns, can be seen as a study in the

actions of an individual in the face of oppressive realit>' of a post-war world. It reminds us of what

Eliot says in his essay on Baudelaire:

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good;

so far as we do evil or good, we are humans and it is better, in a

paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing; at least we exist, ll

is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation;

it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.

The worst that can be said of most of our malfactors, from

statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned

(Eliot 429).

It The Power and the Glory, as in Brighton Rock, the focus is on a protagonist who is

lawless criminal and even a threat in the eyes of the godless, totalitarian state of Mexico,

Before writing the novel, Greene visited Mexico and was horrified by the heat, squalor,

cruelty, desolation and corruption which marked the general atmosphere there. The Power

36

and the Glory is almost a faithful record of what Greene experienced there. In 1960, a

Catholic teacher told Greene :

One day 1 gave The Power and the Gloiy to., a native of Mexico

who had lived through the worst persecutions... Slie confessed that

your descriptions were so vivid, your priest so real, that she found

herself praying for him ai Mass. I understand how she felt. Last

year, on a trip through Mexico, I found myself peering into mud

huts, through village streets, and across impassable mountain ranges,

half-believing that i would glimpse a dim figure stumbling in the rain

on his way to the border. There is no greater tribute possible to your

creation of this character - he lives. {The Power and the Glory,

Introduction, vi).

Despite the element of realism, one cannot discount the fictional aspect of the story.

Greene wrote this novel to prove his thesis that the secular values, however good and

idealistic, are bad if they are non-human. He systematically builds an equation of what is human

and non-human. What is considered to be evil may be better than the seemingly good in the

ultimate analysis.

The setting in The Power and the Glory is significant. The story is set in a state (Mexico)

where there is an autocratic government which is totally against the institution of the Church

thinking it to be a symbol of corruption and as an impediment in the way of general progress

and prosperity. The Church and the priests have been outlawed. The police (red shirts) led

by the lieutenant are chasing and killing priests to eradicate religion from the state. The priests

have fled through forests and mountains.

The protagonist, a nameless priest, as we see at the outset, is being hunted and han-ied

by the police. He is totally shattered, isolated and bewildered. Unhealthy and restless, he

meets Mr Tench, an expatriate English dentist. From here he moves on his mule on a long,

37

arduous journey full of adventures and misadventures. He hides like a tramp in a banana

station and receives some food from Coral, the daughter of Captain Fellows, the owner of the

banana company. From the banana station he goes to a village where his mistress and daughter

live. He learns to his dismay that he is unwelcome there and maybe in all the villages. The

police are taking hostages from eveiy village in order to trace him, making his hiding impossible.

He finds that one by one all havens are closed to him. He cannot even go to his native village

Carmen because he does not want to put someone's life to danger. He travels onward in the

company of a mestizo, a yellow-toothed ignoble Judas, who will betray him to the police. He

knows the evil intentions of his companion but he lets him accompany him. He is arrested on

having a bottle of brandy, a contraband, and is released for his identity as priest remains

hidden.

The priest continues his journey and is safely across the border in a neighbouring

state. However, the mestizo appears again with a scrap of paper. He tells the priest that an

American named James Calver, a gangster, has been shot by the police and is in need of

confession. The priest feels he is being trapped but he is unable to deny confession to a

dying man, which would be against his conscience. He walks back into the trap laid by him.

It seems as if, like Pinkie, he were being pushed to his doom by some invisible force. He

finds the American who knows what is about to happen. After he has prayed for the man,

after his death, he is arrested and taken away. There is no mistake this time. The lieutenant

knows that he is the last priest with whose death the state will be free from all priests. He is

executed without any proper trial for 'treason'.

It is clear that the plot of The Power and the Glory is "episodic and consists of a

succession of encounters between the hairied protagonist and a number of unrelated persons"

(Lewis 61). Various characters - Trench, Coral, Maria, the Lehrs, Calver - are strangers to

each other. They are united only because they come into contact with the protagonist in one

38

way or the other. The episodes involving them only thicken and expand the design of the

novel.

As in Brighton Rock, in this novel, too, Greene is interested in showing how evil

operates in man's life in order to re-affirm his commitment to human values which get

undermined in a rotten and decaying socio-political set-up. He shows how a man is

helpless before the system and, more importantly, before his own self-imprisoned habits and

customs.

That the evil has already crippled the priest's life is clear when the story begins, and

ironically, the priest is well aware of the fact that he is a bad priest. He is painfully conscious of

his failuj-e and comjption. In his conception days, he was arrogant and careless. He was addicted

to good dimiers and wines and became fat and authoritarian. Slowly and surely he grows to be

a proud, lustful fool given to all the wi-ong things.

One of his many sacrileges is his surrender to lust. When he was a priest, he lay with

a woman who bore him a child. This temporary surrender to the bodily pleasure becomes

the potent cause of his alienation from his own self, society and God. His corruption is,

thus, partly sexual, as we fmd in many protagonists in Greene's novels. In his cliild, "the

priest's sin is objectified" (Kulshrestha 79).

The problem of the priest is that he wants to do something for his woman and their

child, but cannot. He wants to love his child but he knows that to love her is to love his sin.

He is pained to know that his child has already begun to imbibe the corruption of the world.

Her pre-maturely adult mind shows that her future is sealed. It becomes clear from his

conversation with his mistress Maria :

'And the child', he said, 'you're a good woman, Maria.

I mean - you'll try and bring her up well ...as a Christian'.

'She'll never be good for anything, you can see that'.

'She can't be very bad - at her age', he implored her.

39

'She'll go on the way she's begun'.

He said, 'The next Mass 1 say will be for her".

She wasn't even listening. She said, 'She's bad through and through'. (PG 76-77)

The only single encounter with his child makes him angst-rlddcn. He finds her sitting

on a root, kicking her heels against the bark. Her eyes are shut, and when they open they

show an absurd pride. Though she is not mature, she shows that she is no longer an innocent

child. When the priest wants to know why she is angry with him, she minces no words in

telling him that he is not his normal father ;

She said furiously, 'They laugh at me'.

'Because of me ?'

She said, 'Everyone else has a father... who works.'

'1 work too.'

'You're a priest, aren't you ?'

'Yes'.

'Pedro says you aren't a man. You aren't any good for women'.

{PG 78).

He is naturally appaled by her maturity. He comes closer to her and wants to kiss her

but fails to do so as the child warns him not to touch her. He is momentarily taken aback

but then goes down on his knees and pulls the child to him as she giggles and struggles to be

free. He tells her, "I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to understand that." (PG 79).

The child's stubborn indifference makes him realize that he has come too late, and that the break

between them is irrevocable:

He said, 'Good-bye, my dear', and clumsily kissed her - a silly

infatuated ageing man, who as soon as he released her and started

padding back to the plaza could feel behind his hunched shoulders

the whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her. (PG 79-80).

40

Later lie realises that as he loves his child, he loves his sin, and because of this he does not

know how to repent. What he has sowai he will have to reap. Though he is a man of God, he has

no right to claim the glory of God. He has done a lot to redeem others but perhaps nothing to

redeem himself His damnation, he feels, is certain. Like Pinkie in Brighton Rock, he believes in

the reality of hell because evil has become an inseparable pait of his life:

A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell, but he carried

Hell about with him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it... Evil ran

like malaria in his veins. {PG 227).

It is during one of his escapades that he muses on the memories of his past. Though he is

now afraid of making surrender to the police, he had made many surrendei-s to his passions before.

He recalls how he renounced at first the feast and fast days. He, then, began to consume alcohol.

Then he gave up the altar stone, without which he had no business to say Mass. But it was too

dangerous to carry it. Carrying it would have meant death. Five years ago he slept with a woman

who bore a child. It was an unforgivable sin. He was given to despair, which was natural:

He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind - a wiiisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind : somewhere they accumulated in secret - the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace... Now that he no longer despaired it didn't mean, of course, that he wasn't damned -it was simply that after a time the mystery became loo great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men. {PG SI).

His mistress Maria confimis what he himself knows too well - that he is a bad priest, and a

damned soul. Maria's biUemess is perhaps the result of her belated realization of her sin, or of

the priest's wilful neglect of his responsibilities towards her. She seems no more enamoured of

him, and wants him to leave her and others of her village as soon as possible. She tells him in

ujiequivocal tenns:

41

'Don't you understand, father ? We don't want you any more ... I

know about things. 1 went to school. I'm not like these others -

ignorant. 1 know you're a bad priest. That time we were together-

that wasn't ail you've done. I've heard things, I can tell you. Do you

think God wants you to stay and die - a whisky priest like you ?...

Suppose you die. You'll be a martyr, won't you ? What kind of a

martyr do you think you'll be ? It's enough to make people mock'.

{PG 76).

This comes as a revelation to the priest: he cannot allow himself to die even, because the

Church will be mocked at. "I wouldn't want the Church to be mocked", he tells Maria. When

Maria accuses him of being a thief, he tells her, "There've been a lot of good thieves" {PG 76).

Despite all his failures and weaknesses, one cannot say that the priest is devoid of eveiything

good. He represents humanity at large, and like any other human being he is a mixture of virtues

and vices. When the novel opens, a child comes to fetch a doctor for his dying mother, and the

priest goes with him. He feels he cannot ignore the call of dut>'. When he is reminded of his boat

which could take him away from danger, he says that he is meant to miss it. He feels bound to his

calling :

He began to pray, bouncing up and down to the lurching slithering

mule's stride, with his brandied tongue : 'Let me be caught soon...

Let me be caught'. He had tried to escape, but he was like the

king of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not

even lie down in case the winds should fail. {PG 13)

On several occasions he says Mass and hears confessions when he is in real danger. When

Coral Fellows asks him to renounce his faith, he says : "It's impossible, There's no way. I'm a

priest. It's out of my power", to which Coral adds, "Like a birthmark" (PG 36). Unlike other

priests, he does not expect too much from those who come to him for spiritual help. When poor

42

people want to confess and lie feels too tired and endangered, he still cannot bring himself to

forego his priestly right:

'Oh, let them come. Let them all come', the priest cried angrily. 'I

am your servant'. He put his hand over his eyes and began to

weep. The old man opened the door: it was not completely dark

outside under the enormous act of starry ill-lit sky. He went across

to the women's huts and knocked. 'Come', he said. 'You must say

your confessions. It is only polite to the father'. They wailed at him

that they were tired... the morning would do. 'Would you insult

him ?' he said. 'What do you think he has come here for ? He is a

very holy father. There he is in my hut now weeping for our sins'.

(PG 40-4])

The passage is significant in revealing Greene's subtle use of ii ony. When the priest is perhaps

weeping for his own sins, people believe that he is weeping for their sins. The priest considers

himself to be an unworthy priest whereas the people feel that he is a 'very holy father'. What

makes us really admire this bad, whisky priest is his readiness to do his duty towards a dying man

towards the end, ignoring the fact that he is being led to a trap by the mestizo. He in\'ites his doom

by agreeing to accompany the Judas. This daring act of a 'weak' man should absolve him of all

woridlysins.

The Power and the Gloiy, like Brighton Rock, projects the antithesis between two

worlds - religious and materialistic; one is represented by evil and faith, the other is "the sinless

graceless cliromium world." {Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads 184). The novel can also be

read as the antithesis between two opposite points of view represented by (he priest and the

lieutenant. An one level tbe opposition between the two men is personal and at the other, it is

s\Tnbolic.

It is in the oppositioii between the lieutenant and the whisky-priest that Greene dramatises

the struggle between political/secular and the religious values. The action of the novel reaches a

43

more intense climax with each meeting of tJie two men, the firet when the priest is not recognized by

the police in the village, and then when he is an-estcd for possessing brandy but set free, and then

at his final capture.

Tlie opposition between the priest and the lieutenant is ideological, llie lieutenant is committed

to an idea of the world devoid of religion and priests; he symbolizes an authoritarian humanism

which promises material well-being in this world instead of happiness in the other. He wants to

drive out of the life of children all that is poor, superstitious and cornapt. While playing with some

children, he feels:

it was for these, he was fighting, lie would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth - a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes - first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician - even his own chief would one day have to go. {PG 54)

The lieutenant stands tor hatred and violence and, the priest for love, compassion and charity.

There is a long disputation between the two, when the priest is being brought Ibr execution:

'Well . we have ideas too', the lieutenant was saying, 'No more money for saying prayers, no more money for building places to say prayers in. We'll give people food instead, teach them to read,

give them books. We'll see they don't suffer.*

'But if they want to suffer...'

'A man may want to rape a woman. Are we to allow it because he wants to ? Suffering is wrong.'

'And what happens afterwards ? I mean after everybody has got enough to eat and can read the right books— the books you let them read ?'

44

'Nothing.. Death is a fact. We don't try to alter facts.'

'We agree about a lot of things', the priest said, idly dealing out his

cards, 'We have facts, too, we don't try to alter- that the world is

unhappy whether you are rich or poor - unless you are a saint and

there aren't many of those. It's not worth bothering too much about

a little pain here.'

'We've always said that the poor are blessed and the rich are going

to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for

the poor man too ?... It's better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven - so long as we don't push his face in the dirt.'

'1 hate your reasons,' the lieutenant said. 'I don't want reasons. If

you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say pain's a good thing, perhaps he'll be betler for it one day. 1 want to let my heart speak.'

'At the end of a gun.'

'Yes. At the end of a gun.'

'Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart's an

untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn't talk about

love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child's

strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.' (PG 192-193)

Greene has always separated himself from Utopian thijikers. The realization of the Utopian

world the lieutenant is dreaming of is impossible in the context of the present world. "There are

others, of course, who prefer to look a stage ahead, for whom Intourist provides cheajD tickets into

a plausible future, but my journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are"

{Greene, Journey without Maps 20).

Guns can do nothing to impiA'e the lot of the miserable people. It is the faith of the priest

which can hold good amid the coruption and squalor of the world. "I can put God into a man's

mouth just the same - and 1 can give him God's pardon. It wouldn't make any difference to that if

eveiy priest in the Church was like me" {PG 195). During the long debate between the hvo, we

feel that the secular and authoritarian power is losing its ground and the religious convictions

45

holding strong and the priest growing in stature. When the secular power, at the end, captuj-es the

religious, the lieutenant realises how small the victory is. At the end a boy named Luis establishes

the enduring nature of the values represented by the priest. He has admired the lieutenant and

watched the soldiers respectfully, but now he spits on the lieutenant's gun after the priest's death

and welcomes the new priest with reverence. The boy's gesture symbolizes man's ultimate rejection

of violence and the acceptance of faith in an evil world.

The lieutenant in The Power and the Gloiy, like Ida Arnold in Brighton Rock, offers an

alternative to the religious view of life, but the imbalance present in Brighton Rock is less here. The

ideal for the lieutenant and the priest is the same - the well-being of the people. But their ways are

different. As the novel progresses, tliere are moments of mutual recognition of each otlier's goodness.

When the lieutenant gives five pesos to the priest, he says, "You're a good man." (PG138). Here

the priest, ironically, becomes one of the men for whom the lieutenant would destroy all traces of

the old religion. Later, the lieutenant, impressed by the strength of conviction and his sympathy for

those who suffer, admits, 'You aren't a bad fellow' {PG 199). Jt becomes overtly clear that the

priest - lieutenant antithesis is different from Pinkie - Ida antithesis : here justice is done to both

ideologies which are incompatible. "Greene is on both sides, the whiskey - priest's and the police

lieutenant's. Both embody a discipline; both present modified extremes" (Paul West 94). No doubt,

ultimately the priest triumphs, but the shift in Greene's attitude towards the seculai" is an indication

of his changing commitments. The lieutenant with something of a priest in his intent obser\'ant walk,

a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again, and with the gun in his

hand makes way for Father Rivas of The Honoraiy Consul.

Greene has succeeded greatly in the evocation of tlie Evil he wants to sumiount in this world.

The prison cell scene is very significant in this respect: "This place was ver)' like the world :

overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love : it stank to heaven." {PG 123). In the dark,

crowded, stinking prison cell, surrounded by thieves, criminals and a couple making love with cries

of intolerable pleasures, the priest is moved by an enomious and iirational affection. He was

46

touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals. He had

a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people

came kissing his black cotton glove. He now realizes tJie change in this - the change from indifference

to involvement:

That was another mystery : it sometimes seemed to him that venial

sins- impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportvinity

-cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.

Then, in his inocence, he had felt no love for any one; now in his

corruption he had learnt... (PG 137)

The change from innocence to coniiption makes him more human than he was in his conception

days. Gwenn R. Boardman contends :

"In the cell's narrow world, the priest finds an understanding he

had not been able to reach in the blinding light of his earlier

and simpler religious life... With his clearer vision of this world, a

vision paradoxically obtained in total darkness, the priest feels

charity, compassion, and a real affection for his companions."

{Boardman 70)

We come to recognise the symbolic value of tlie dark cell as a place for fijlly revealing to the

priest "the convincing mysteiy - that we were made in God's image. God was the pai-ent, but He

was also tlie policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac and the judge" (PG 110). The exaltation

of pain and suffering is another aspect of life which shows his heroic virtues and brings out the

grandeur of his personality. When he is preaching the sennon in tlie village, he says :

That is why i tell you that heaven is here : that is a part of heaven

just as pain is a part of pleasure... Pray that you will suffer more

and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching

you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from

47

(he jefe because you are loo poor to pay, smallpox and fever and

hunger... that is all part of heaven - the preparation. {PG 69).

The priest's own life is a preparation for the divine grace, for his redemption. He suffers but

continues his struggle relentlessly, the struggle against the secular authority.

Greene's concern with the individual's actions in the face of evil rampant in the world is

obvious. It is the nature of one's action which detennines where he stands. The priest appears to

be a man unworthy to be the final representative of the Church in a province cleared of priests. He

was proud and complacent in his early days. It was his pride which made him stay while others had

fled. He is shown as a proud, lustful, greedy man who has grown fat and authoritarian. He is a

coward and lacks in self-restraint. He diinks and is the father of an illegitimate child, Brigittaa. And

he dies in a state of moral sin, because he is denied his last confession by Don Jose, the renegade

priest.

However, in spite of tlie manner of his life, the priest is a saint and a mailyi' because he lives

and dies committed to his vocation as a priest. As the novel opens, the priest, on the run, is

about to take a boat for Vera Curz, but he misses the boat for the dying sick woman. "I am

meant to miss it" {PG 17), he tells Mr Tench. Towards the end when the priest is safe and respected

and has started living a comfortable life he returns with the mestizo, the Judas, to give absolution to

the dying American gangster, James Calver, fijlly aware that it was a trap for him.

As a result of the sins he has committed, the priest suffers agonies of conscience, but unlike

Pinkie who was not ready to repent, there is in him a certain longing for forgiveness, and through

repentance he wants to seek God's grace and mercy. It is in his repentance that the hope for

salvation arises:

In a true repentance the consciousness of outraging God's love is

far more prominent than any concern of the sinner with his own

fate. He may feel he is 'hell-deserving', but his anxiety is for restored

relations with God. (McKenzie 162).

48

In spite of his weakness of character, the priest never gives way to despair. He is conscious

of his esti"angeinent from God. His anxiety for redemption is clear when, listening to the confessions

of others, he reflects:

He felt an immense envy of all those people who had confessed to

him and been absolved... But he couldn't believe that anyone

anywhere would rid him of his heavy heart. Even when he drank

he felt bound to his sin by love. {PG 173).

When the priest is about to be executed, he repents sincerely:

...he was not at the moment afraid of damnation - even the fear of

pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment

because he had to go to God empty handed, with nothing done at

all. It seemed to him that moment, that it would have been quite

easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little

self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has

missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now

that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.

{PG 209)

The devotion to his vocation brings him near to God in spite of his cowardice and lack of

self-restraint. Tlie acknowledgement of sins and the attitude of humility in the face of hopelesness

growing gradually but definitely, helps the priest to reach sainthood : "I don't know a thing about

the mercy of God, I don't know how awfiil the human heart looks to him. But 1 do know this - if

there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I will be damned too..." {PG 198). The

despair, the unforgivable sin, is not there in case of the priest. His death also is not an act of

despair; it is a sacrifice in the cause of his vocation as a priest.

The priest has his sins and failures but all his weaknesses make him a part of human life,

something that shocks those whose piety is really an absentation from life. Greene shows in The

49

Power and the Gloiy that an individual is more important than a particular sect. The uplift of the

masses is what is most important, and all the other things ai-e secondary: "That was the difference,

he has always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared

only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continenf

(PG 82).

Significantly, the motto of The Power and the Glory comes from Dryden :

Th' inclosure narrow'd , tlie sagacious power

Of hounds and death drew nearer every hour.

It suits the novel amply if we keep in mind how the priest is being chased by the hounds of power

(the red shirts). The distance between the two gets nan-ower and nan-ower and at last the priest is

airested and executed.

However, a more apt motto may be deduced from the text itself In one of his musings, on his

way to Maria's village on his mule, the priest daydreams:

His mind was full ofa simplified mythology : Michael dressed in

armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets

with beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of

the Fathers had said, of what God intended for men -the enormous

privilege oflife-this life. (/'G 57-58)

The two words - 'this life' - in the passage can be taken as another motto of the novel in

the context of Greene's ideology woven artistically in the text. It becomes clear that the novel does

not allow the religious impulse to dominate the human. The religious factor is important only in so

far as it introduces into the human "a kind of beauty and a kind of goodness" (Lewis 60). This

concern of the novelist is re-inforced by the priest's exultant cry on seeing the vacant-faced

peasants gathered in a hut on the mountainside at dawn : ""'Above all remember this - heaven is

\\QVQ''\PG61).

50

Greene's commitment to what is human is subtly conveyed as the priest seeks God in the

darkness and stench of prisons, among the sinners and the rascals. It is significant that the priest

does not have any feeling of revulsion at what he sees and experiences during his captivity in the

prison for carrying a contraband. He finds himself surrounded by a motley of the wi-etched people.

There are unseen odorous bodies, with a woman wanting to confess and an unseen couple copulating

somewhere announcing their orgasms with cries of pleasuj'e. The priest feels an unusual affection

for the inhabitajits of the prison.

Another way of Greene to affirm his commitment to the human and the secular is laughter.

Laughter is a means to convey fellow feelings, and distinguishes The Power and the Gloiy from

Brighton Rock, and even The Hearl of the Matter Pinkie Brown and Major Scobie never smile,

but the whisky priest smiles and even laughs in the midst of sorrow and suffering.

The comic vision is brought about at various critical points in the novel. Imprisoned with

pett>' criminals, innocents and murderers, the priest tries to feel comfortable. There is a 'pious'

woman, for instance, who is too anxious to allow any rest to the tired priest as she wants to

confess. She is disdainful towards other prisoners whom she calls thieves and murderers : "'You

don't know the sort of \\Tetches who are here, father. Thieves, murderers'" (PG 198), and denies

that she could have any connection with them. The priest giggles and says : "'No, no. Thieves,

murderers... Oh, well, my child, if you had more experience you would know there are worse

things to be'" {PG 127). At the end, when he is airested by the police, the lieutenant, in a sai'castic

tone, says, "I suppose... you're hoping for a miracle" {PG 198), and wonders how a well-read

person like him can believe in miracles. "The first time the Indians see an electi-ic light they think it's

a miracle", says he, to which the light-hearted, comic response of the priest is quite meaningfxil in

the context:

'And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead

you might think so too'. He giggled unconvincingly behind tlie smiling

mask. 'Oh, it's funny, isn't it ? It isn't a case of miracles not happening

51

- it's just a case of people calling them something else. Can't you

see the doctors round the dead man ? He isji't breathing any more,

his pulse has stopped, his heart's not beating : he's dead. Then

somebody gives him back his life, and they all - what's the

expression? - reserve (heir opinion. They won't say it's a miracle,

because that's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and

again perhaps - because God's about on earth - and they say :

these aren't miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our

conception of what life is... they say science has disproved a

miracle". He giggled again. {PG 198-199).

It is this giggle "that saves both the priest and the novel Greene has wiitten about him. For it

is when he laughs that we know this slovenly rogue, this unshaven/7/co/u to be also a saint"

(Lewis 68).

Greene has his own way to laugh at the lieutenant. After ananging for the priest's execution,

the lieutenant sits down at his desk and falls asleep. We are told: "He couldn't remember afterwards

anything of his dreams except laughter, laughter all the time, and a long passage in which he could

find no door" {PG 206). Greene seems to suggest that it is the lieutenant, and not the priest, who

is the real prisoner, the trapped man.

Even the mestizo, a Judas, has a clownish aspect. The priest remembers a Holy Week

carnival where a stuffed Judas was hanged from the belfry and pelted with bits of tin. It seems to

him "a good thing that the world's traitor should be made a figure of fun" {PG 19).

There is an important passage which is both comic and grotesque. Greene here underlines

the priest's humanity through a mix of feelijigs by keeping a delicate balance. The event is about a

tussle over a bone of meat between the hungry priest and a mongrel bitch :

For a moment he becomes furious - that a mongrel bitch with a

broken back should steal the only food. He swore at it - popular

52

expressions picked up beside bandstands : he would have been

surprised in other circumstances that they came so readily to his

tongue. Then suddenly he laughed : this was human dignity disputing

with a bitch over a bone. When he laughed the animal's ears went

back, twitching at the tips, apprehensive. But he felt no pity - her

life had no importance beside that of a human being. {PG 143).

Thus, The Power and the Glory, like Brighton Rock, focuses on what is essentially

human : a mixture of good and bad, or what might have been good in different circumstances.

Unlike Pinkie, the bad priest in The Power and the Gloiy is not really bad, and the messiah of the

poor, represented by the lieutenant on the individual level and the state on the collective level, is not

really good and likeable. The credit goes to Greene that though he is on the priest's side, the view

point of the state does not come out to be totally unacceptable.

The Power and the Gloty has strong political milieu and a political ideology to boot, and

yet it is not a political novel. The focus remains on the priest and his seeming fall fi'om grace througli

various sinfijl acts and his final redemption. Though, like Pinkie Brown, he feels he is damned, he

seems to have escaped damnation through his essential humanity, and may even be called to have

come near to be a martyr, if not a saint in the proper sense of the temi.

In the third novel of the "Trilogy", The Heart of the Matter, Greene constructs the story

out of his war time African experiences and clearly shows how his commitment is fast changing

from the religious to the secular and the political. The focus is, however, on a religious problem, as

is in Brighton Rock. The protagonist here speaks of the Church as knowing all the problems, but

his life is shaped by a socio-political set-up which is anti-religion.

The scene of the stoiy is a place in Africa in 1942 - a West African British colony, unnamed

but probably the Gold Coast. It is a port which is inhabited by a mixed population of British

officials, detribalized natives, East Indian negroes, Asiatics and Syrians. The hero, Major Scobie,

Deputy Commissioner of Police and a Catholic convert, finds a letter with a German address

53

hidden in the cabin of the captain of a Portuguese ship. The letter is found out to be liarmless but is

not handed over to the higher authority by Scobie wlio feels too much for the Portuguese captain.

The letter is destroyed and Scobie says nothing about it to anyone. Thus, his excessive

conscientiousness is revealed. He is a man v 'ho is disliked for his uprightness. He shows his liking

for the place and tlie people. His wife Louise, also a Catholic, is knouTi as neurotic and pretentious.

Their only child died at school in England.

As the story unfolds, Scobie has been passed over for promotion. Though it is a trivial

matter for him, his wife feels humiliated and makes a lot of fuss about it. She wants to escape to

South Africa and needs two hundred pounds for the purpose. Tlie husband is ready to please her

out of his sense of responsibility. He wants to please her but he has got no money and fails to

manage it. He has to borrow the amount fi-om a SjTian smuggler Yusef who wants to monopolise

the illegal export of diamonds, while the government is dead set to stop the business as it is

benefitting the enemy (Germany). Another Syrian Tallit who is Yusef s competitor is nabbed by

Scobie on a tip-off from Yusef Unknowai to him, he and other olficials are already under the watch

of a police-spy, William from England. He is thought to be in league with Yusef as he has been seen

in his company on a few occasions. William falls in love with Louise, but the relationship does not

develop as Louise soon goes out to South Africa.

The survivors from a torpedoed ship are brought to the African port. Among the injured the

two seem to affect Scobie's destiny the most. A child, for whom Scobie prays sincerely, dies. But

its death proves to be a turning point in Scobie's life. His dowaihill journey begins. Tiiere is then an

English woman, Helen Roll, a young widow rescued under his supervision. He falls in love with her.

She becomes his mistress. He continues with the affair, and in a weak moment composes a love

letter for her. Yusef comes to get hold of the letter and forces him to participate in his illegal trade.

His association with Yusef leads to the murder of A.li, his servant. Louise returns suddenly and

Wilson exposes her husband. As she loiows that her husband is a true Catholic and will not be able

to hold on to his lie, she forces him to go to confession. In order to satisfy her, he tells her that he

54

has gone. Unable to abandon either woman, he feels tenibly upset and guilt}'. He plans his death in

such a way that it seems to be natural. But his suicide becomes knowai. His women are seen with

their suitors. The novel ends on a note that is reminiscent of the ending of Brighton Rock. Scobie,

like Pinkie, knows that he is damned and harbouj's no hope. But there is a Catholic priest. Father

Rank, who tries to assure Mrs Sobie that he is perhaps not damned as he really loved God.

The plot line clearly reveals that The Heart of the Matter is a traditional novel, though it is

not a direct and unprejudiced impression of life. The nan-ative pace is leisurely but never slack.

R. W.B. Lewis rightly observes:

hi The Heart of the Matter, there is no savage eruption out of

animal holes into the glare and open world that characterized

Brighton Rock, and none of the rhythmic peregrinations through

anarchy of The Power and the Glory. The incidents take

place very much within the society of the book and involve— not

prescribed laws but - persons of significance and authority whose

intimate knowledge of each other provides much of the hero's tragic

dilemma. (Lewis 69)

llie novel is undoubtedly natui'ally told. One is impressed by the aixay of traditional characters,

especially by the merchant Yusef whose fat and candid dishonesty is reminiscent of some of Dicken's

characters. But unlike any traditional novel vwitten in tlie nineteentli centuiy, its action sei-ves not to

expose an individual or a society but tries to unlock the mysteries of the individual destiny. It is

significant to note tliat the wai', though continues to be in the background, is a major political event

that looms its large shadow on almost all the characters of the novel.

The Heart of the Matter is different from Greene's previous novels in the sense that "the

problem of reconciling the existence of suffering with an omnipotent and merciful providence is

now raised explicitly for tlie firet time" (Kenneth Allot and Mii'iam Fairis 217). Scobie is tormented

55

by his love of God because he canot reconcile it with his love of human beings. For Scobie human

beings are more important. "God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of

one of his creatures" {HM187). Scobie believes in God and yet he can believe in no "God who

was not human enough to love what he had created" (//M121). He is in a constant struggle with

God who does not seem to have the same compassion as he has and who does not allow him to

airange the happiness of others as he wishes. He feels "he could speak to him onJy as one speaks

to an enemy" (//A^235).

The Heart of the Matter, like Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, deals with

the conflict betv 'een evil and faith, but here God is not seen as one concerned about the suffering

of mankind. And this makes Scobie turn away from God and distrust Him. At one point he goes to

confession and says, "I don't know how to put it, Father, but I feel - tired of my religion. It seems

to mean nothing to me. I've tried to love God, but - I'm not sure that I even believe" {HM 153).

John Atkins in his analysis of The Heart oft he Ma//e/-contends that Graliam Greene, by tliis time,

had started shedding his faith in the religious ideologies and was upholding the disloyalty to the

religion and the Church. In a broadcast discussion with Elizabeth Bowen and VS. Pritchett, 'The

Artist in Society' (July, 1948), Greene said :

Disloyalty is our privilege... If 1 may be personal, I belong to a

group - the Catholic Church - which would present me with grave

problems as a writer if 1 were not saved by my disloyalty. You

remember the black and white squares of Bishop Blougram's

Chessboard ? As a novelist, I must be allowed to write from the

point of view of a black square as well as of a white, Doiibl and

even denial must be given their chance of self-expression." (qtd. in

John Atkins 167-168)

Greene's doubts in the capability of the Church to help the humanity in its bettennent start

with 77? Heart of the Matter and continue in The Quiet American and A Burnt- Out Case with

56

a force, which is a debate of behef and non-belief. Tlie Catholic intellectual must at some time or

another become aware of the incompatibility of the religious beliefs and the world as it is revealed

to him. Greene's concern with humanity makes him turn away from the good-evil debate and

pursue his concern with individual's lot. Tliere had always been conflict in Greene's mind but it had

not found its point of rest until now. He had always, so fai'as we can judge, been a faithful Catholic.

He had not criticized his Church, althougli he had occasionally found fault with its priests. But now

stin-ings of revolt were occasionally noticeable. Scobie's repudiation of the attitude of Church

"Even the Church can't teach me that God does not pity the young", {HM213) and the priest's

furious response to Louise's "Tlie Church says..." (HM272) is characteristic. In The Heart of the

Matter, we are presented with Scobie's dilemma. He stands confused between his loyalty to God

and his loyalty to human cause.

Scobie commits the sin of receiving the sacrament in a state of mortal sin. Then there is the

gravest sin of despair and suicide, and according to the strict doctrine he should be damned. The

Heart of the Matter, then, may be called a study in despair, despair as the Roman catholic Church

knows it, but then it is the quality of one's actions which detemiines his salvation in spite of the fact

that he has committed sins in life. Tliis is hinted at the epigraph to the novel taken fiom Peguy: "Tlie

sinner is at the ver}' heart of Christianity. Nobody is as competent as the sinner in the matter of

Christianity. Nobody, if he is not the sainf ('Epigraph', The Heart of the Matter). Scobie is a

sinner in the eyes of the Church, but all his sins have been accentuated by his deep feelings for

others.

Scobie feels immense pity for his wife Louise. She reminds him of a dog and a cat. She gives

him "the impression of joint under a meat cover" (HM 23). Her face has the ivoiy tinge of

ugliness when he loves her. Her hair which has once been the colour of bottled honey are dark and

stringy with sweat. Those were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and

responsibility reached the intensity of a passion. Scobie is "bound by the pathos of her

unattractiveness" (//M28). When he manages to send her to South Africa, he feels relaxed; he has

57

the consolation of having done his dut)': "ITie sadness was peeling off his mind, leaving contentment.

He had done his duty" {HM103). He feels pity and responsibility for all those around. It is again

out of pity that he conceals the letter found in the Portuguese Captain's bathroom during a search

for smuggled diamonds. Then come the two survivors from the torpedoed boat - a small child and

Helen Rolt. He cannot bear the suffering of the child, and feels

that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days

and nights in the open boat that was the mystery, to reconcile that

with the love of God. {Hhd 120)

He is stirred by pity for the child and prays : "Father, give her peace. Take away my peace

for ever, but give her peace" {HM25). His prayer is listened to; the girl dies and gets relieved of

her suffering.

In his relationship with Helen Rolt, he is once again caught by this fatal pity: "Sadly like an

evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore" {HM 157). While going towards the

hospital, he feels as if he has shed one responsibilit}' only to take on another. Louise says to

Wilson about Scobie "... he has a terrible sense of responsibility" {HM19). Helen abhors his pity,

but it is a part of Scobie: "Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. The conditions of life nurtured

it."(/yM]78).

The overwhelming sense of pity puts Scobie in a mess. In a letter to Helen he wiites "I love

you more than myself, more than my wife, more than God I think... I want more than anything in the

world to make you happy" {HM 181). But then he is bound to his wife also, and feels that her

happiness is his responsibility:

No man could guarantee love for ever, but he had sworn fourteen

years ago, at Ealing, silently during the horrible little elegant ceremony

among the lace and candles, that he would at least always see to it

that she was happy. {HM 59)

58

These two vows are iiTeconcilable and lead him to despair finally. He cannot abandon Helen

for Lousie, but he is equally bound to his wife: "...let me pity you again, be disappointed, be

unattractive, be a failure so that I can love you once more without this bitter gap between us. Time

is short. 1 want to love you too at the end" {The Heart of the Matter 54). He is caught up in such

a situation from where no escape is possible.

When Louise returns from South Africa, Scobie has to choose between his wife's claim

upon him and that of Helen Rolt, but he cannot decide because any decision he takes will result in

suffering for the other. He goes to confession, but is denied the absolution, because he is not

prepared to break off his relation with Helen:

When he came out of the box it seemed to Scobie that for the first time his footsteps had taken him out of the sight of hope. There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes... It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair. {HM 222)

In order to avert his wife's suspicions, he goes to the communion in a state of mortal sin,

thougli he is aware of the fact that it is damnation. He does it because he does not want his wife to

be unhappy. The situation becomes more and more intolerable for Scobie when he feels that this

act of deceiving Louise and God will have to be repeated again and again. His mental anguish

reaches its climax:

0 God, 1 am the only guilty one because 1 have known the answers all the time. I've preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because 1 can't observe your suffering. 1 can only imagine it. But (here arc limitsto what Icandotoyouorthem.

1 can't die and remove myself from their blood stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And I can cure them. And you too God you arc ill with me i can't go on, month after month, insulting you... You'll be better off if you lose me once and for all. I know what I'm doing. I'm not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. {HM 25%)

59

For Scobie the happiness of others is of great importance. His prayer is: "O God, if instead

I should abandon you, punish me, but let the others get some happiness" {HM220). Suicide, then,

is the inevitable choice for Scobie. He takes himself as a patient o^ angina pectoris and takes an

overdoze of Evipan to kill himself

Scobie, like Pinkie, chooses his own damnation. He is aware of the fact that this sense of

responsibility will lead him to despair:

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. (MM 60)

Scobie is a good man, corrupted by pity. His endeavour to impart happiness to others,

paradoxically, results in his own sufferings as well as of others. He feels that he would have made

the promise to Louise even if he had been aware of the consequences of such an action:

He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his

actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he

made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this

action might take him. (HM 60)

Scobie's actions are accentuated by an error of judgement, rather than by sins against hope.

Boardman contends that "Scobie loses his paradise because he commits the sins of the rebellious

angels : Pride and Disobedience" (Boardman 83). There is an element of pride in Scobie's pity

because of liis feeling that he owes it to himself to relieve the sufferings of others. He is exposed as

a man who has confused his sense of pity with God's love and mercy. Instead of turning to God for

mercy, he assumes the role for himself, he responds to people as though he were the divine parents:

"If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets ? if one

60

reached whal ihey called the heaH ofthe mallei" ?"' {HM 124). There is Scobie's eiTorofjudgement

when he idemifies l^embenon with Clirist: "Christ had not been murdered - you could not murder

God. Christ had killed him.self: he had hung himselfon the cross as surely as Pcmberton from the

picture - rail" {HM 190). Then there is the identification of.Ali with God when Scobie looks at his

murdered body : ' '0 God. I've killed you." (HM241). lie sees God as a failure and perverts

the Catholic view ofChrist as a victim, forgetting the reasons for Christ's sacrifice, lie has no trust

in God ; "No, I don't trust you. I've never trusted you... I can't shift my responsibility to you"

{HM 259). This makes V.N. Lees remark :

The personality presented is, in fact, a curiously egoti.stic. blind one.

in.sensitivc to the fulness of others' existence, prone to sentimentality,

self-deceived in its very self-knowledge, and lacking in real moral

courage. (Lees .39)

Lven at the end he believes himself damned for all eternity unless a miracle happens, quite

forgetting the power of God's mercy. His salvation requires not a miracle, but a word of repentence.

By choosing to be a Judge for himself, by seeing God as a failure, by not trusting Him, Scobie

injures God and, in his false pride, turns away from His mercy.

The Heart ofthe Mutter, in the manner of/i/'/if/?/ /? Rock, ends with a conversation between

Louise and Lather Rank. When Louise says that it is no good praying because he is damned, the

priest says : ''Lor goodness sake, Mrs. Scobie, don't imagine you or 1 know a thing about God's

mercv... fhe Church knows all the rules. But it does not know what goes on in a sinsile human

heaii" {HM212). And he continues : "It may seem an odd thing to say - when a man's as wrong

as he was - but 1 think, from what 1 saw of him. that he really loved God" {HM212). Although

suicide is regarded as a sure doorway to Hell, it is Scobie's inherent goodness, his actions and

God's merciful response to his dying desire for love which indicates a hope for Scobie.

In The Heart ofthe Matter, as in Greene's other religious novels, happiness and salvation

ai-e obstiucted by the oppressive evil ofthe world. However, as Lrancis W'yndham contends "In

61

Brighton Rock, his lirsl specifically CallTilic no\ cl. he (Greene) was on sale ground. The conllict

helween good and evil, damnation and salvation, was eleaiiy defined. But in his latei novels there

was a mingling ofgood and evil, strength and weakness in his central characters" (Wyndham 8).

Scobie has characteristics of both Pinkie and the whisky-priest. He is a sinner, though not as

consciously as Pinkie, and he has. like the whisky-priest, a strong feeling ol'compassion for people

around and a desire to do good. Mowcver. Scobie's goodness and his virtues of pity and compassion

ironically bring about his tragedy.

Scobie's West Africa is another picture of MelL as squalid as Mexico and Brighton : ''Nobody

here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on

the other side of death, and on this side nourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness..."

(/•//V/36-3 7). In the climate of West Africa we find the inbred pettiness of an isolated comnninity.

the snobbeiy and boiedom. meanness and malice. In Wilson and Hairis. the two old Downhamians.

Greene has reduced human nature to a level where nothing dignified can ever come of it. Symbolic

of the nature and surroundings of the inhabitants of the colony is the great stone building of the law

courts and police station which stood like

the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame

the human beings rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel... In the

dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells,

Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and

injustice- it was the smell of the zoo. of sawdust, excrement,

ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but

you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen

carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke. {HM 15)

Sin and corruption are rampant in Scobie's world. The moral climate of the place is of

undi-sguised corruption. The natives. Syrians and the f-uroi^eans ai'e all alike - coiTupt and unreliable.

The school boys lead a sailor triumphantly tov\ards the brothel. The natives resort to lies and

62

^ t:mm. • "'^

bribeiy as niosl oflhem are diamond smugglers. Yusef. wiih his unabashed villainy and his crooked

arguments, is a typical inhabitant ofthis world.

The Heart oj the Mutter is primarily a personal tragedy, but it corresponds to the tragdy of

a class. The place selected for its nakedness- the place where one knew the worst- is the raw

spot of the capitalist world : the colony. The symbols of decay are not solely those that might lefer

to morality alone, but are also the symbols of failing faith and power, hi contrast with l:..iVl. Forster's

A Pas.sai^e lo India and George Orwell's Burmese Days, the two important novels on colonial

life, the centre of interest here is not the interaction between Europeans and non-liuropeans,

though the tension is not altogether absent: it is compressed into the personal relationships of a few

people. Scobie's pity is that of a colonizer for the natives. Me feels responsible to assume the

burdens of the undeveloped people. The tragedy ol'Scobie takes place in a climate of fear and

guilt, where it is hard for a man of goodwill, lacking good actions, to remain happy. Scobie's

breach of regulations, professional indiscretion, adultery, curruption, complicity, sacrilege and

suicide result from the pity which is common to the personal and social exploitation. The morality

of public life affects the personal life also, and naturally the corruption of West Africa affects

Scobie's life, too:

He should have left the bottle where it stood : it had been placed

there for one purpose, directed at one person, but now that its

contents had been released it was as if the evil thought were left to

wander blindly through the air, to settle may be on the innocent.

(HM .38).

What Greene seems to be suggesting is that "In the absence of a transcendental ideal... humanity

would certainly approximate the lowest pemiitted point." {Donal O'Donnel 91)

The interlacing of sin and virtue in Scobie creates the ambiguity of his character. i3ut he is

ceilainly not like Pinkie in whose nature there is something which makes his damnation certain.

63

Since love of God is "the lo\c of one's tcllow - men. ;aiscd lo be highest power. ;U which

evervman assumed the form ofChrist cruciiled. which is one aspect ofthe hicarnation" (Ivdward

Sackville West 94). Scobie's \\k is not .senseless and futile Me is essentially a good man. though

he violates the law as well as the rules ol ' lheChuich. Caught in circumstances in an evil world

where the possibilities ofhappincss are vanishing, Scobic adopts a way which makes his life

meaningful.

It is significant that many critics have noted the improbabilities in the very character and

setting of The Heart of the Mailer. It has been pointed out by George Orwell in his article "The

Sanctified Sinner', for example, that Scobie's motives do not adequately account for his actions.

Mis main critical thrust is about the thesis ofthe book : that it is better lo be an eiring Catholic than

a viiiuous pagan. In a satirical tone, he says :

|Greene| appears to siiarc the idea, which lias been floating around

ever since Baudelaire, thai there is something rcWhcv disiingiw' in

being damned: flcll isasort of high-class nightclub, entry to which

is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics,

are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish... drunken,

leacherous. criminal, or damned outright - The Catholics retain their

superiority since they alone know the meaning of good and evil.

(Orwell 107).

The contention of Orwell may be right, but it is perhaps going loo far from the text. In the

words of Lewis. "LilcraiA' criticism does not invite us to scruple over Greene's relieious ideoloiiv

or lack of it; our concern is simply the dramatic effectiveness of any religious opinion he happens to

show"' (Lewis 73). It is in this context that we should judge the effectiveness or otherwise ofthe

novel. The novel seems to be quite successful, in spite ofthe deficiency of its projected theology,

in dramatizing the tension between the divine and the human.

64

The ending oflhe novel shows this tension clearly. One hears the incomplete sentences ol~

Scobie : the one as he falls asleep-"O God, bless-'', and the other before he falls senseless-

"Dear God. I love-" (/7/V/265). One is not sure of the unsaid objects of the verbs 'bless" and

'love'. In the last line of the no\'c\ there is a suggestion that Scobie may have loved God. and that

God may show him mercy. However, the shift is clear: Greene's priority is to the human and the

secular. God can wait if one decides to serve his creation. Scobie sulTers because he tries to

become "God", or rather he tries to relegate to himself the responsibilities of God. He conveniently

ignores the inner voice-- perhaps the voice of God- that he should give up one woman and leaves

her responsibility to God and continue to live peacefully. But as he knows he cannot do so, he

readily faces death to absolve himself from all responsibility and to save himself from committing

the crime of lying at the altar of God.

The fate he faces is individual but the life he lives is laigely shaped by the inexorable forces of

social and political institutions. Apolitical reading of the novel makes it clear. The colonial setting of

West African port is clear in the beginning with references to the sense of superiority in the minds

of the while inhabitants with their hatred for the black people, ilarris, an accountant at the U. A.C..

tells the British spy William :

' I hate the place. I hate the people. I hale the bloody niggers. Mustn't

call'em that you know... A man's boy's always all right. He's a real

nigger - but these, look at 'em, look at that one with a feather boa

down there, fhey aren't even real niggers, .lusl West Indians and

they rule the coast...' (HM 13).

This attitude of •we-they', of course, do not come out on the surface. Hal all it is present, it

remains hidden, but its invisible presence can be felt. Scobie, the hero, is in harmony with the

place. Perhaps because ol'his Moo' lenient attitude towards the natives, especially the Syrian

merchants, he loses favour with the authorities and is passed over ibr promotion. In spile of his

65

sc\ cral good points, it cannol be denied that he is not a \ cr\ erficicnl poliee oflleeras his tbi'ce has

not been able to slop ihe illegal export ofdiamonds. Ihe polilieal deeision ofsending a sp_\.

William, eomcs 10 shape his destiny. William falls in love with his wife Loui.se. whieh must ha\e

prompted him unconseiously to send Louise to South Afriea e\ en b\' borrowing moneN iVom

Yusef. a diamond smuggler - an aetion whieh leads to his ultimate doom.

It is significant thai the whole system is corrupt. The bribes arc almost openly given and

taken -and it is through bribes that the merchants carry on with their illegal business. What is a

matterofconcern to the l-nglish government back home is that the export ofdiamonds is helping

the (jermans. and it wants to stop this practice at any cost. We are reminded again and again that

the war is going on. The survivors of a ship loipedoed by the enem\ submarine are brought to the

African port from the I'rench area. Seven stretcher cases are brought, i'our persons died - one on

the way and one on the land, one from black water and one from exhaustion. Among the seven

survivors the two - a child that dies later and a widow Mrs Helen Rolt - play significant roles in

Scobie's life. Seobie prays to God to grant "peace" to the suffering child, "'father', he prayed,

•give her peace, fake away my peace for ever, but give her peace" (HM 125). lronicall\. his

prayer is granted. With her death the child gains her peace but Seobie loses his peace for ever, as

veiy soon he commits adultery by falling in love with flelen i^olt. another victim of the sinking

tragedy, fhe concomitant feelings of guilt and responsibility prove to be too much for him to cope

with.

The fear ofwar obtrudes again and again, an ineluctable part of human consciousness.

Seeing the stretchers of injured persons being brought on the shore. Seobie is afraid of the safety

of his wife who is sailing for South Africa. The .sound of the sirens continue to remind ofwar. 'fhe

sirens for black-out make i lelen Rolt fearful:

"Is there any danger'.'" she asked anxiously.

"13anger ?'

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'The sirens.' "Oh. none at till. These are just alarms. We get about one a month. N'olhing ever happiness." (HM 136).

The passage is significant as it is quite suggeslive. I'liere is no danger on the physical level as

the sirens wail, but they are a grim reminder to Scobie of another danger which is on the moral

plain - danger to his Catholic soul. But Scobie is oblivious ofthat. He falls headlong into a lustful

relationship with Rolt, commits a sin and thereby loses his .soul, which is worse than losing his

body.

it is. thus, wrong to conclude that Greene's focus is religious, and that he ignores the socio­

political set-up in The Heart of the Mailer. The question, posed by George Orwell - ""Why

should this novel have its setting in West Africa ? Except that one of the characters is a Syrian

trader, the whole thing might as well be happening in a London suburb" (Onvell 106)— seems to

be iiTclevant. The colonial setting and the shadow of war are the most important features of this

novel, and arc interwomen subtly into the structure of the novel, and save it from being a purely

theological work, out to prove a thesis.

The three novels - Brighion Rock. The Power and I he Glory and 77? Mean of I he

Mailer— have many similarities, 'f he three protagonists, the murderer, the priest and the policeman,

are involved in a spiritual turmoil created by the tension between Good and Evil. I'inkie is an

inverted priest. The virtuous policeman, Scobie. gets involved with crime and criminals. Both feel

they are damned, but the doubts about their being saved persist. The whisky priest in The Power

andihe C/ory is a rogue and a picaro, but carn'ing on his priestly duties, becomes a martyr and a

saint. Greene underiines two points : no one is free from sin, and a sinner can be saved if he shows

humility or grace. The socio-political set-up is important in determining one's destiny. Pinkie is

what he is because of a system which nurtures crimes and criminals. In the godless Mexican state,

the real priest is considered to be an outlaw. In the African colony the policeman commits suicide

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oui offcars ofbeing caught up b\ ihc forces ol'lavv and olTacinL; his God. These ihrce llgures liave

'"ihe shilling and inicrvvovenatu-ibulesorihe Greenean man : a beingcapablcof imilaling holh

Christ and Judas; a person who is at once the pursuer and tlie man pursued; a creature with the

splendid potcntiantyeitherordamnationorsah'alion"(l.xnvis52).

In the '"Trilogy". Greene has thus given us pictures ofthc societies which need to be relbrmed

through the constant efforts of the individual. The three novels clearly reveal Greene's love for the

primitive as he wants to examine human lii'e in its raw form. However, the most important point

about the ''Trilogy" is that we observe the shades of Greene's shifting perspective from religious to

secular and political, especiall)' in The Heart of the Matter, which continue in The Quiet American

and A Burnt-Out Case.

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