The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene

An audio book.

Ah, Graham Greene again. What a pool of calm and good sense one enters into when reading one of his books.

This is the story of Major Scoby, a policeman in West Africa during World War II. The vicissitudes of war, the clash of cultures, the threats of disease and violence, are ever present, yet Scoby presents himself as a model of reason and rectitude.

Scoby is a Catholic, which is of course the heart of many of Greene's matters, but in the course of this novel he finds himself grimly at odds with his religion, and in danger of losing his soul. In the end, we are presented with an intensely sad and difficult paradox, which left me wondering how, exactly, Greene felt about his religion.

This is such a beautifully written piece of work that I hope to acquire it on paper and read it again.

Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene

I don't know why I didn't read this book many years ago. Greene never fails to satisfy. This is the story of Mr. Pulling, a retired banker, bachelor whose mother has recently died. His aunt comes into his life at his mother's funeral, reveals an alarming secret, and changes Pulling's life completely.

Some choice bits:

p. 79

[Pulling moves his lips when thinking. Once, in the bank...] "The habit betrayed me very badly with a woman who was stone deaf and a lip-reader. She was...very beautiful...couldn't help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness...One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing..."

p. 146

"...as I lay in the...nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears...I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and [illegible] and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert."

This last item is the name of a dahlia. I should have mentioned that Pulling raises dahlias.

p. 179

[O'Toole to Pulling]

"...Have you any children, Henry?"

"No."

"You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There's no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them."

p. 218

[Visconti to O'Toole]

"...Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

An audio book, from the PC Library.

I know that I must have read this book before, many years ago, but I had forgotten most of it, and was enchanted by the plot as well as Greene's wonderful prose.

An essay by Peter Hulme.

James Wormold is a vacuum-cleaner dealer in Havana, single father of a teenage daughter. Business is not very good in pre-revolutionary Cuba (ca. 1958), so when Wormold is approached by an agent of British Secret Service with an offer of money to gather and transmit intelligence to London, he is persuaded to cooperate.

Wormold is a hopeless secret agent, and he knows it. Instead of actually recruiting sub-agents or doing any real spying, he creates a fantasy list of people and bogus information -- and he is very successful at it. London is thoroughly taken in.

There is just enough humor to relieve pathos, and just enough romance to make it a nicely understated love story.

Indie Bound Daily Book Calendar

Last Christmas my sister-in-law Diane gave me a daily tear-off calendar from IndieBound.org,  which represents the American Booksellers Association, an organization of independent book stores.

Each page of the calendar contains something about a work of literature, often in the form of a question with the answer printed upside-down in tiny print at the bottom of the page.

I've had daily tear-off calendars before, often with cartoons on each page, but I've never had one that kept my attention as this one has. As it nears the end of 2010 and the pad has grown very thin indeed, it seems I've begun to notice books that I want to read much more often on its pages. In the last week these books have come to my attention:

• Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott
• Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene
• The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Barry Udall
• Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald

I look forward to reading every one of these. I haven't picked up a book by Graham Greene in a long time; the other authors are all new to me.