Graham Greene's [Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party] must certainly be the most curious he has ever written. In it he has abandoned, as if impatient with the impedimenta of fictional realism, that density of specification which made his agonized concern with trapped and victimized humanity so moving in his best work—moving even when we sometimes felt that we (and his characters) were being dealt a hand with marked cards. Signs of a fatigued, self-parodic, even farcical handling of familiar materials had appeared earlier in some of the novels beginning with Our Man in Havana (1958); but his most recent fiction—The Honorary Consul (1973) and The Human Factor (1978)—reassured his admirers that the old mastery of setting and suspense, and the capacity for sympathy, were still intact. To say that they do not touch greatness (as do Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory) is not to belittle their solid achievement. By contrast, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party is hardly a novel at all but rather a cautionary tale—almost an allegory—dealing in the most schematic fashion with the deadly sins of greed, pride, and despair….

Doctor Fischer seems to me a work of fatally mixed intentions. I would feel easier about the book if it were possible to take it simply as Greene's little experiment with religious allegory, a fable in which questions of verisimilitude are beside the point. Certainly its emblematic aspects are heavily underlined. Except for the narrator (a tattered hand-me-down), the characters are like a set of figures from a crude sixteenth-century woodcut illustrating a morality play. (p. 22)

The allegorical elements seem obvious: Pride, Avarice, and Despair, supported by Anger and Gluttony, march across the pages, opposed by Love and Innocence and, at the very end, by Pity, which is capable of enfolding even the detestable Doctor. Readers will catch many echoes of the quasi-Jansenist, quasi-Manichaean version of Catholicism that has animated some of Greene's finest work. But do these elements add up to a coherently embodied truth or message? Here I must admit bafflement.

By making Jones a nonbeliever (though wistful for belief), is Graham Greene attempting a negative or backdoor approach to Christianity? Is he suggesting that the absence of faith in God renders a merely earthly love hopelessly vulnerable to an accident like Anna-Luise's? Jones's despair at her loss is so final, so irremediable, that even the prospect of his own death loses its point. Is Jones, in his despair, as damned as Doctor Fischer is in his? And suffering (always a loaded issue with Greene)—is suffering for others necessary for the development of a soul?… Ordinarily I would be happy to leave such matters to an exegist or apologist more knowledgeable than I in the subtleties of the Faith, but the schematic arrangement of Doctor Fischer, together with the thinness of its more strictly novelistic substance, forces these thematic considerations into the open.

But of course Greene wants the book to be read as a novel as well, wants the reader to participate in—not merely register—the love between Jones and Anna-Luise and the cruelty of her death; evidently he wants us to take these things as "seriously," in a novelistic sense, as we would in a sentimental novel like A Farewell to Arms. The scene in which Jones sits at a window table in a hotel restaurant, impatiently waiting for Anna-Luise to return from the slopes, is the most memorable in the novel—far more impressive than the luridly lit party scenes; it reminds us what Greene can do when he imagines his way fully into an episode and respects its inner logic, so to speak.

The effectiveness of the writing here makes all the more puzzling the perfunctoriness of the treatment elsewhere, especially with regard to the characterization of Anna-Luise. Greene seems to be relying on a kind of emotional shorthand: postulate a young woman of perfect beauty, goodness, and tenderness; kill her off abruptly, and then let her lover voice his grief in angry or laconic phrases…. Alas, the shorthand doesn't work. Anna-Luise amounts to little more than an adolescent daydream of the all-gratifying female, a lovely doll whose destruction seems as gratuitous as Jones's much-vaunted despair seems hollow.

In both its aspects I found Doctor Fischer about as nourishing as a communion wafer to a nonbeliever. (p. 23)