What unites [Frisch's novel Man in the Holocene with his play The Firebugs] is the unsettling notion that some rational, well-meaning force is actually willing catastrophe. In both cases, this willing appears as a collaboration between the leading character and Frisch. Imminent disaster, man-made or natural, has always had its attractions: it promises solidity, clarity and resolution. To be Swiss is to exist in that splendid wooded sanctuary between territories overrun and decimated by one terrible war after another; to be Swiss is, in short, to be in a state of perpetual yet uneasy reprieve. And out of this unease comes the uneasy cohabitation of nurturance and the will to disaster in this sturdy, fitful, philosophical adventure tale. (pp. 259-60)