Love, greed and God: these are the subjects of Graham Greene's [Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party]. The first and the last of these his readers have come to expect. But it is greed that is here the centerpiece, and that gives this book its strangeness….

The alternate titles have a comic ring, and much of the novel is lightly told. Fischer and the Toads are grotesques of the sort that we accept only in comedy. The love story of Jones and Anna-Luise, by contrast, asks to be taken seriously; it comes from a different fictional world, where people matter and wounds really hurt. The attempt to make warp and woof of these two fictional worlds, each with its own conventions, each demanding to be seen as whole, doesn't work. Greene weaves no density of texture. His several strands lead on and on with an effortlessness...