Volume 27, Number 10 · June 12, 1980
Cautionary Tale
By Robert Towers
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party
by Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, 156 pp., $9.95
Graham Greene's new novel must certainly be the most curious he has ever written. In it he has abandoned, as if impatient with the impedimenta of fictional realism, that density of specification which made his agonized concern with trapped and victimized humanity so moving in his best work—moving even when we sometimes felt that we (and his characters) were being dealt a hand with marked cards. Signs of a fatigued, self-parodic, even farcical handling of familiar materials had appeared earlier in some of the novels beginning with Our Man in Havana (1958); but his most recent fiction—The Honorary Consul (1973) and The Human Factor (1978)—reassured his admirers that the old mastery of setting and suspense, and the capacity for sympathy, were still intact. To say that they do not touch greatness (as do Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory) is not to belittle their solid achievement. By contrast, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party is hardly a novel at all but rather a cautionary tale—almost an allegory—dealing in the most schematic fashion with the deadly sins of greed, pride, and despair.
Review, 1810 words
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