Word: sinner
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...Roman Catholic convert, with a convert's intensity: he recently voiced the hope that the Church may be driven underground, to find there a revival of spiritual force. Was his new book expounding a heresy or defending the faith? Had he made his "hero" a damned sinner or a shining saint-or merely a nice guy who didn't know how to get along with women? And what, exactly, did he mean by "the heart of the matter...
...Saint? What is Greene trying to' say? That Scobie is a sinner whose story should evoke horror? Or (as Catholic Author Evelyn Waugh supposes) that Scobie is almost a saint...
Sentimental humanists (who do not believe in either saints or sinners) would say: Scobie was a "sinner," yes. But might not his sins have been purged by an earthly purgatory of suffering? And did he not try to repent the final sin of all? When the poison he had swallowed brought a great cloud down over the room, Scobie was trying to make an Act of Contrition. And just before his body thudded to the floor, he managed to say aloud, "Dear God, I love...
...they know that they have met Scobie and his world before. For this world, disguised though it is under African heat, is the same cruel, sordid, vulturous hell that Greene has conjured up in most of 14 books, and Hero Scobie is Greene's equally familiar creation-a sinner disguised as a hero-villain...
...Likable Sinner. Graham Greene writes with pity; is it possible that he also writes with irony? If so, his irony is so deep that it has escaped the notice of reviewers, and will probably escape most of his readers. He seems to be saying that Scobie-though, God knows, no saint-is in reality a very likable, perhaps admirable, and probably forgivable sinner. And the implicit sympathy with which Author Greene watches his "hero" plod doggedly from one crime to the inevitable next-adultery, sacrilege, murder and suicide-seems to show that Greene is on Scobie's side...