[With] Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, Greene's publishers have reopened an irrelevant issue by labelling this tautly written novella a 'black entertainment', but dealing as it does with despair, loneliness, suicide, death, and the paradoxes of religious belief, Doctor Fischer of Geneva could also serve as a microcosm of the themes which have infused Greene's fiction for half a century….

Doctor Fischer is capable of only a single emotion; he despises people and, with a maniacal will to power, he wants to find out whether there is any limit to human greed. His dinner parties are, then, little more than laboratory experiments during which he eviscerates his guests, stripping away all their pretentions to dignity….

As the Doctor admits, he, too, is avaricious. But his greed is of a different order; it is more like God's. Fischer doesn't so much want to create human beings as to debase them to the level of automatons or Pavlov's dogs….

In Greene's novels the dogmatist, the moral absolutist, is always a dangerous man, sometimes a deadly one. Usually, he is like the Lieutenant in The Power and the Glory or Pyle in The Quiet American, someone blindly committed to a cause which brings pain to the people he wants to help. In contrast, Doctor Fischer has no intention of helping anybody, but he is still a moralist of sorts, an inverted one. Acting out of rage at man's weakness, expecting greed of everyone, he systematically creates conditions which are bound to expose people at their worst….

Because of its brevity, there is at times something a bit schematic about Doctor Fischer of Geneva and, no doubt, many will read into it much that comes from a knowledge of Greene's previous books. But the novella stands well on its own. The characters, even minor ones, have a palpable reality and the prose often takes on the compression and evocative power of poetry….