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...