Somebody once told me that Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the greatest novel in the world. This opinion amazed me. I thought the hero of that book ludicrously improbable. He seemed to think of evil as something for the long winter evenings; for him, gratuitously ruining the lives of others was a hobby. This same flaw lies at the heart of Graham Greene's [Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]. Perhaps we should think of it not as a novel but as an allegory—a nice word, which if it does not wholly explain at least excuses a great deal. Though the characters have ordinary names and do ordinary—indeed humdrum—jobs, and though they live in towns the names of which we have heard, they are not so much people as personifications of contrasting attributes in human nature. Dr. Fischer is not just spiteful; he is Wickedness itself. His daughter is not merely good; she is Virtue.

The book is cold. For this reason, I enjoyed it less than other stories by the same author. At the same time I was aware that we ought to find it in our souls to be glad of this change in Mr. Greene's way of writing. Though the narrator within this tale does not subscribe to any organized religion, and the Almighty plays a less active part in this drama than elsewhere in Mr. Greene's work, the boldness and the baldness of its style bring us ever nearer to the final and most direct statement of the author's moral philosophy…. Mr. Greene never mentions the joys of his faith. He only tells us of—nay, he drenches us with—the sorrow brought on by transgression.

In spite of all this, Doctor Fischer has many great assets. Though it is not quite so beautifully written as most of Mr. Greene's prose, the tale is unfolded in a masterly fashion. The art of narrative writing is, from the first page, to lead the reader into thinking he foresees a climax and not to cheat him by simply offering him something different but to fulfill his expectations in a manner and to a degree worse than he could ever have dreamed. This is precisely what happens here. The Bomb Party turns out to be an anticlimax far more deeply wounding than the awaited climax would have been. On the road to this disaster, we pass all the author's well-known obsessions like milestones—the longing for death, the ambivalent flirtation with suicide, the triumph of worldliness over all else, the brevity of carnal love…. Mr. Greene is not contemptuous of happiness, but he mistrusts anyone who seeks it too eagerly, and he despises those who claim to have found it.

As soon as you begin reading this book, shuddering slightly as though you were stepping into an icy and dangerous sea, you will be drawn deep into this bizarre fable. But do not hope to identify yourself with any of its participants; do not expect to weep at their misery or rejoice in their brief triumphs. (pp. 33-4)