The entire time that I read The Heart of the Matter, I kept thinking that it really should be a Bogart film or some such. There was a film adaption sometime around 1950 I guess, but I didn’t recognize any of the actors. The story feels incredibly claustrophobic. I know Heart of Darkness is supposed to feel that way, but it has nothing on Greene’s novel.
Despite being a very masculine novel in many ways, it has two interesting female characters. Louise manages to be fairly likeable, which is somewhat surprising considering. I also didn’t expect to like Helen, but I did (another Helen that I identified with; yeesh). I love the scene where Scobie is reading a story to a young boy who is very ill, and he makes it into an adventure novel when it isn’t and Helen overhears. I can see why she’d be interested in him after that; so many authors do poor couple meetings.
The main theme is Catholicism/Scobie’s shifting morality (or apparently shifting; I think that is open for debate). Suicide absolutely fascinates me, particularly the way different societies and religions address it. It might be a morbid fascinating (okay, let’s be honest, it is morbid), but I think how we view suicide and its meanings tells us a lot about ourselves.
In contrast to that mostly straightforward novel, Eyeless in Gaza is rather disorienting at first. It’s essentially non linear (I saw essentially, since the chapters bounce around to different times, but the different times present linearly, so it’s like several different times are interspersed, but they’re individually in order).
While this narrative choice takes some getting used to, I ultimately really liked it, since it allows themes that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to come out. It also makes for unusually climaxes, and does a better job of showing the complexity of a human life than a usual presentation of time would. Some of the stories were more interesting to me than others, though, and it is rather long.
That being said, I really have no idea what the significance of the title is; I really do not.
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