[In the following positive review, Greene discusses the common themes that tie together the stories in The Burnt Ones.]

Every living short story, as Elizabeth Bowen reminds us, demands a measure of experiment. Today, what narrows the range of some practitioners is that they pit technical bravery against their need to document a lost paradise. In this contest, invention too often becomes the first casualty. Most of us have read quite enough narratives with a “My Days as an Unlicensed Dentist in Detroit” format. Such nostalgia Mr. White vigorously dismisses. Seven of these stories occur in his own Australia; the rest introduce people who live in the Mediterranean world. Initially, perhaps, one frets about the identity of the wallaby, and what is signified by the ugly word “fridge,” but this man's imagination by-passes more than geographical boundaries. Mr. White commands attention even when he leaps—lapses is too weak to characterize diction so alive, if hieroglyphic—toward the inexpressible.

As one reads one recalls another melancholy searcher, Sherwood Anderson. Just as for his less sophisticated American brother, Mr. White's adversary is the terror of isolation. In “Dead Roses” a hefty Australian girl rejects the advances of a young physicist. She marries a stingy older man, who eventually dies. As his heir, Anthea travels widely. In Greece she meets the scientist, and his easygoing wife gives her a rose. Anthea pins the flower with a brooch, accidentally drawing attention to her diamonds. Returning to her hotel, she feels sure that a molester is tracking her. Forlorn, inhibited, she lies on her bed as in a tomb.

In “Being Kind to Titina” a Greek lad chances upon a girl he had known in the strict, hieratic security of childhood. Titina has become a striking young woman and the mistress of a Frenchman. In a futile gesture of reconstruction, the young people go swimming. Caught by the allure of her new world, Titina insists that she must remain with her older friend. The narrator knows better than to protest. “… I had begun to understand that such remarks are idiocy.”

Thwarted widows and ingénues who fall from virtue are as common as slugs in a public telephone. What carries the day is that Mr. White frequently unearths paradoxes which are less fuzzy than unfathomable. One is not certain how much of his power depends on technique and how much on temperament. This is one of those rare cases where puzzlement, tantalizing because it is honest, constitutes an author's best card.

In “A Cheery Soul” Miss Docker trumpets her urge to do good. She takes pride in her fondness for metaphysical debate—she has read Manong Lescoat. Dutifully she admonishes the choir, at length sabotaging it. She alienates all benefactors, causing the collapse of her own pastor. She becomes the scourge of the Sundown Home for the aged. At the close, still preaching, she entreats a dog to keep her company. The animal lifts one leg and urinates on her.

What saves Mr. White from the leer that erudite connoisseurs of the grotesque commonly affect is the height from which he watches his misfits. Mr. Szabo, the Hungarian refugee who has an affair with an athletic Australian girl, begs to be struck with a whip. What fascinates him about love, as he chooses to define it, is that it causes rot. But even Mr. Szabo never disintegrates from human wreck into cinematic ogre. In Mr. White's world the blackest sin is inattention, even if there is nothing one may do to alter cases. “They had continued to live,” we are told about a married couple, “in the one envelope, as it were, which nobody had bothered to tear, because no one was sufficiently interested.”

Whatever insights nature provides depend on explosion rather than illumination. With their complexions like that of a moth, these wanderers pay a high price for their rare “bursts of sun, and a bashing of wind, and the blaze of ripe barley.” Only through assault, apparently, can such strays touch the world as well as one another. The August heat smoulders “garnet-red.” Old men's hands are like “purple bird's claws,” and there is a lingering smell of mould in all of the summerhouses. “‘So grotesque,’” a Greek wife condemns her own behavior. “‘But then one is, in almost all situations where reality intrudes.’”

If there is any road out of this international Sahara, Mr. White does not encourage us about our chances of finding it. In “Down at the Dump,” the last story, a girl, Meg, whose aunt is being buried in an adjoining cemetery meets the son of the shiftless family next-door. As they kiss, her enraged mother discovers them. The mother laments the passing of her sister, yet she is furtively relieved because of Maisie's reputation for being loose. Trapped, Meg does not want to run the risk of anger. “Since joy had laid her open, she had forgotten how to defend herself.” Transfiguration limits one's range of choices even more than daily wariness. The girl tries to picture her aunt, whom she loved, but finds it impossible to do so. “Yet, each time she failed, the landscape leaped lovingly.”

One should not accent this major chord: it is as rare as it is sudden. At best Mr. White's people aspire to a dusty beatitude, the physical projection of which is Greece, “a poor landscape, splendid, too, in its own way, of perfectly fulfilled austerity.” One understands this bond between the son of a new country and that land where tragedy is as durable as its stunted pines and its whitewashed walls.

If Mr. White's “burnt ones” are damned—his title translates freely a Greek phrase—they disappear while still scrambling to reason, or barter, or even bribe their way to some harbor. One woman inquires about the number of times a human being is buried alive. The frequency of this nightmare may well be what Mr. White wishes to underline. Even as dirt tumbles into their eyes, nonetheless, his moths make noises of protest.

With both gratitude and pique one realizes that existence in the Land Down Under isn't so unconditioned. We have all entered those liver-colored brick houses where girls develop voices like blotting paper, and where roses burn to a malodorous brown under the brutal sun. Mr. White shuts yet another door through which one had peered in quest of fresh fantasies, new ways of defying a known world, only to find oneself staring back from the front hall mirror.

One wonders about Antarctica.