This is not a particularly happy book. It is sometimes exciting, sometimes cinematic, but it is never happy. "He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that that is where we really belong." It is always well-written. I don't think the guy who wrote the introduction to this edition, James Wood, either understood this book or even at all liked it. To reduce this text into performatory philosophizing about religion ignores the basic truth of the prose's main focus: white (colonial) people in West Africa. That is the substance, not the mental battle Scobie has with God and his moral failure—that's the content. For me Graham Greene uses religious themes to make his work serious, but his eye, as an artist, perhaps with the exception of 'The Power and the Glory', is drawn to these fine details of the ways Western society gets transplanted onto unsuspecting victims. Unlike others, he regards the colonialists themselves as victims too, although, of course, if he allowed political objectivity to interfere with his art, he would have nothing to write about.