Love, greed and God: these are the subjects of Graham Greene's [Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party]. The first and the last of these his readers have come to expect. But it is greed that is here the centerpiece, and that gives this book its strangeness….

The alternate titles have a comic ring, and much of the novel is lightly told. Fischer and the Toads are grotesques of the sort that we accept only in comedy. The love story of Jones and Anna-Luise, by contrast, asks to be taken seriously; it comes from a different fictional world, where people matter and wounds really hurt. The attempt to make warp and woof of these two fictional worlds, each with its own conventions, each demanding to be seen as whole, doesn't work. Greene weaves no density of texture. His several strands lead on and on with an effortlessness that becomes peculiar, as though across an emptiness more pure than the nature we know will bear.

The novel's unity is not helped, either, by ponderous comparisons of Fischer (a name that asks too loudly to be read as Christian symbol) to God and to Satan, nor by ingenious, irrelevant speculation on the nature of the soul. Nor is it helped by subplots that spring up only to vanish inconsequentially. For instance, Jones is asked to translated (into Turkish) a secret letter than has to do with international military sales. He does—and we never hear a word more about it. In such places the novel has the look of an early draft, sprouting with possibilities that await development or deletion.

Perhaps Greene's greatest gift has always been his power of figurative language, and apparently no number of books will exhaust it. We meet, for example, Mr. Kips, one of the Toads, "a thin old man in a dark suit bowed almost double. He projected his head forward and looked, I thought, rather like the numeral seven. He held his left arm bent at his side, so that he resembled the continental way of writing that number."…

Greene is wonderful, too, at summing up the experience of a lifetime in ways that make it suddenly comprehensible….

For graces such as these, anything by Graham Greene rewards the reading, even a novel that, like this one, seems the work of the author's left hand.