Book summary

This 1948 story of moral decay was one of Graham Greene's greatest popular and critical successes, though not one of his own favorites. His hero Scobie is a colonial police commissioner in West Africa. He endures a loveless marriage and a nondescript career patiently enough until he falls in love with a young shipwreck survivor who, literally, washes ashore at his feet. To send his wife on an extended holiday to South Africa, he borrows money from a Syrian merchant, who then uses his position to blackmail Scobie into turning a blind eye to his smuggling. Once his wife returns home, Scobie finds that he can no longer reconcile his affection for his mistress with his duties as a husband, a policeman, and a Catholic, and is pressed to a desperate resolution of his confusions. One of Greene's aims in this novel was to open a philosophical exploration into the differences between pity (which he sees as destructive) and compassion (which is positive). Upon its publication, Greene commented, "I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe, and America--the last title to which I had ever aspired."

Media reviews

"It is impossible not to feel a kind of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved to Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish."