The Heart of the Matter

Michael Kitchen's excellent voice comes to embody the gin and rain-sodden cheer that epitomized the late British Empire in the tropics. The novel's hero, Scobie, is a police official who has conflated duty with love and who doesn't get much pleasure out of either. We have the fevers, corruption, even a war, but because this is Graham Greene writing, the real damage below the water line is not done by the U-boat, but by our hero's own character. Kitchen does the Brits, the carping wife, the sorrowful mistress, locals honest and locals who lie like rugs. Everyone speaks politely, precisely, incessantly, and yet it seems not to matter at all. This road goes right to hell. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine