Doctor Fischer is not only a short novel, but an unsettingly spare one. I doubt if there is a detail in it, from lines of dialogue to what characters order for lunch, that does not contribute to the book's onrush to its final, and grim, moral point. (p. 375)

C. S. Lewis observed in Perelandra that truly Satanic evil is not romantic, black-caped, and thrillingly dark, but rather moronically, cruelly mindless and petty. And there is certainly a strong admixture of this kind of diabolism in the mysterious Doctor Fischer. But there is something else. His "experiments," godlike in their moral autonomy, are like the tests of a vengeful Jehovah eager to see, not who might be saved, but whom he can damn. At least since Brighton Rock Greene, good Gnostic that he is, has insisted that blasphemy and despair are at least second best to love and hope. It is the Laodiceans [in this novel], from Ida Arnold to the Toads, who are really lost….

Jones is a failure (Greene has always been obsessed with failure) and, in surviving his wife, a betrayer (Greene has always been obsessed with betrayal). But because he is those things he is also the storyteller of Doctor Fischer of Geneva, and his bitter voice is like a reluctant blessing on our common burden of charity.

To compare great things with great, Greene's last three novels—The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, and Doctor Fischer of Geneva—can remind us of Kafka's major, unfinished books, The Trial and The Castle. Just as Kafka banishes all virtues but Hope from his characters' moral repertoire, so Greene banishes all but Love. And in both cases, the odd and fascinating allegories that result are in fact acts of a distinctively modern, existential Faith in the very center of the abyss.

To say this much is to say the by-now predictable, that Doctor Fischer of Geneva is another masterwork in what has to be the most astonishing literary career in English since Joseph Conrad's. Greene has achieved the stature where his quotations from and allusions to his own earlier books are a central part of his meaning. And Doctor Fischer of Geneva is rife with such allusions and glancing, tantalizing half-references. But if the book's exploration of "Greeneland" (the landscape of the Fall) is familiar, it is also radically innovative, discovering new and more forbidding promontories and crevasses in that landscape than he has mapped before. Greene, who has flirted with suicide his whole life long, has frequently said that writing for him is primarily an alleviation of the great bane of existence, boredom. But he has never, till now, shown us quite how profoundly "boredom," in his sense, is the elementary burden of consciousness itself, or how much the act of writing, for him, is, like charity, the art of moral survival.

It would be reductive, even silly, to call this a "great" book. It is simply the latest installment in this painfully honest man's fifty-year dialogue with his demons. And, since his demons are so largely ours also, and since he is more honest than most of us let ourselves be, his book is not "great," but in a deep sense, essential. (p. 376)