[Maybe] it's necessary to have read … Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, to see, once and for all, the full strangeness of Greene on sin. Far from hating evil with that good clean hatred one feels it deserves, Graham Greene contrives to honor it by installing it at the center of every interesting question about human beings and their little lives. He can't endorse evil, and wouldn't if he could—that is, he can't say bad is good—but he gives it the place of honor at his table, literally, in Doctor Fischer: this despite Greene's keen social conscience, immense political awareness, and broad international experience in these frightful times of ours. (p. 30)

Fischer himself, in his glittering palace on the lake, with his lofty and bitter metaphysics and epicurean, black-tie cruelty, is a lovely improbability; he is an artifice that, most of the way through this short book, makes no claim to resembling anything one could find in nature. He is posited for the sake of argument, and posited delightfully: this is decidedly one of those works Greene himself calls his "entertainments." His suavity and panache bring to mind George Orwell's remark about Greene: "He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club…." A useful insight, but Orwell was mistaken in seeing all of Graham Greene in that mauve light. He missed how Greene sets such evil in a context of human ordinariness and even tedium; how he examines Hell's night club, as it were, in glamorless daytime.

The structure of Doctor Fischer is a simple thing, and permits easy showing of what I mean. The novel is the story not only of Fischer but of his son-in-law Jones (as in "ordinariness"), whose unhappy life is nearly proof that God is indeed greedy of our humiliation…. Jones is not Toad material—because he's not rich enough, Fischer thinks at first, giving the impression that the mere Joneses of the world are not even worth the trouble to humiliate. But Fischer comes to respect Jones. When Jones shows disgust at the humiliation of the Toads, Fischer comes to feel that he must explain himself, which is the occasion for some of the cleverest, most Satanic repartee that Greene has ever written…. The story of the novel, its graceful, disturbing thread of narrative, leads to two notable results. First, it confirms Fischer's sardonic hunch that God has given Anna-Luise to Jones only to keep him on the string a little longer. She dies a death that is at once picturesque and revolting, and Jones is plunged deeper than ever into loneliness. Second, it reveals the hidden romantic history of Doctor Fischer himself: a wife, Anna-Luise's dead mother, who rebelled gently against his tyrannical ways. Now there will be readers who feel that the humanization of Doctor Fischer, by means of giving him familiar human causes for his evil, is a falling-off from the gorgeously fictive, allegorical plane on which the entertainment is set. Such a reaction fails, as Orwell's did, to see the radical bifurcation of the mundane and spiritual that makes for Greene's particular effects. Though he is a moralist, you don't get in Greene any unanchored evil or fleshless good: they are always limbs on a mordantly familiar human body (or corpse). This is why, in the end, he doesn't hate sin enough for Brother Somebody's taste: because it "smells of mortality," like Lear's hand.

Doctor Fisher of Geneva or the Bomb Party (the bomb party is an allusion to the spectacular finish) is not one of Greene's most impressive books. It's too sketchy, even for a novella, to support the weight of its own themes. Perhaps Greene is temporarily tired—his recent The Human Factor is arguably his masterpiece and must have been a mammoth undertaking. But though it is not Greene's very best, Doctor Fisher does reveal as clearly as any of his works the terribly consistent direction of his creativity. That direction is always toward a mapping of the places in the contemporary landscape where the idea of God (and Satan) used to be, the lacunae left by God's demise, and by the demise of faith in God. Secular readers are made to discover the sources of the religion they don't have, the exigent spirit that inhabits (or inhabited once) the temples they don't go to. Greene shows the religious need as existing independent of the God who doesn't exist; he does this by staking out the point at which materialist accounts of ordinary experience fail. This is a project of almost unique importance among the work that novelists do these days—but you have to prepare yourself to have to do with a novelist who has something important to discuss with you, as well as a will to entertain. (pp. 30-1)