A refined form of Russian roulette provides both the climax and the subtitle of Graham Greene's [Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]—which, even in these days of publishers' short measures, must be described as a novella, rather than a novel. Dr. Fischer, an unloved and unloving Swiss who has made millions by inventing a toothpaste, gives a Bomb Party (his phrase) for the rich hangers-on whom his now dead daughter used to call his 'Toads' (toadies)….

Among the Toadies—who include an international lawyer, an alcoholic film-star, and a tax-adviser—is a typical Graham Greene middle-aged, déclassé failure, called Alfred Jones….

Alfred falls in love with Fischer's only daughter, Anna-Luise; and the account of their love-affair, before it is abruptly terminated by Anna-Luise's death in the accident, shows Mr Greene at his masterly best. As every novelist knows, happiness is, of all emotions, the hardest to convey; but Mr Green conveys it perfectly, with no sentimentality, even if with that poignant sense—a perpetual shadow of foreboding cast by the summer sun—that 'this is too good to last'….

This is an intensely interesting but hardly major work in the Greene canon. When writers grow old, become world-famous and know that their achievement is secure, it is not unusual for them to indulge in what is, in effect, a game of creative Russian roulette…. Mr Greene, with the restlessness of an actor too often type-cast, here decided that, come what might, he wanted to do something totally different.

The result is a bitter little parable about the subservience of the rich to riches; about the despair that 'deepens so much every day one lives, that death in the end seems to lose its point'; about the ephemerality of happiness; and about the way in which a man may finally come to despise himself so much that life becomes intolerable for him. Through this parable shines not merely the incorruptible stoicism of Alfred but the incorruptible stoicism of his creator.