Somebody once told me that Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the greatest novel in the world. This opinion amazed me. I thought the hero of that book ludicrously improbable. He seemed to think of evil as something for the long winter evenings; for him, gratuitously ruining the lives of others was a hobby. This same flaw lies at the heart of Graham Greene's [Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]. Perhaps we should think of it not as a novel but as an allegory—a nice word, which if it does not wholly explain at least excuses a great deal. Though the characters have ordinary names and do ordinary—indeed humdrum—jobs, and though they live in towns the names of which we have heard, they are not so much people as personifications of contrasting attributes in human nature. Dr. Fischer is not just spiteful; he is Wickedness...