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the leper colony, but we do not have the love affairs or the life of
the great architect that make the extraordinary final emptiness
important. We see the soul at a point of theological instability, and
there only.
Greene has a unique gift for plot and a miraculous way of
fmding a clever objective correlative for his spiritual perplexities.
Loss of faith in art and love equals the "cure" of the leper, muti–
lated, but at last without pain. The humid tropical atmosphere, the
tsetse flies, the intense
colons,
with their apologies and their ar–
rogance, the strained, disputatious priests, interestingly pock-marked
with weaknesses: this is the properly exotic and threatening setting
for the Greene dialogue.
A Burnt-Out Case
seemed a partial failure
to V. S. Pritchett in his
New StateJ'man
review. He felt the in–
fluence of the stage had been unfortunate and worked less well
than an earlier absorption of film technique. Yet he is not entirely
dissatisfied and decides that Querry, the hero, succeeds as a
vehicle for certain ideas if not as a "man." Pritchett calls Graham
Greene, "the most piercing and important of our novelists now."
Frank Kermode in a brilliant article in
Encounter
is unhappy
about
A Burnt-Out Case.
He finds it " so far below one's expecta–
tion that the questions arise, was the expectation reasonable and
has there been any previous indication that a failure of this kind
was a possibility?" In Kermode's view
The End of the Affair
is
Greene's best novel because, to simplify, here the author more
openly and with greater seriousness faces his case against God.
Querry, a builder of Catholic churches, is only, the novel tells
us, "a legal Catholic." He doesn't pray, he loathes being dragged
into other people's lives
by
the ropes of his religion and his fame;
he doesn't want his sins to be made interesting as priests in novels
like to do with villains; he resents having his vices stubbornly inter–
preted as incipient virtues. Father Thomas frantically insists upon
absorbing a devastated, worldly spirit. "Don't you see that you've
been given the grace of aridity? Perhaps even now you are walk–
ing in the footsteps of St. John of the Cross, the
noche oscura."
In trying to come to some sort of judgment about Greene as a
novelist one would have to ask himself whether a significant picture
of modem life in the last thirty years could
be
made from doctrinal
puzzles, seminarian wit and paradox, private jokes, Roman Catholic
