Leprosy in the Soul:

...Perhaps Greene has not changed as a moralist but has simply reached the peak of his power as an artist...

...Even to someone who knows little or nothing of the nature of faith and the religious life, this novel brings deep pleasure, for there is no reason why he cannot acknowledge the existence of faith and be moved by the lives of people who struggle to achieve it...

...Before his end, we come to believe that his cure was in sight...

...Perhaps it is impertinent to suggest that Greene is mellowing...

...The disease from which he has suffered is worldliness...

...The story is neither as grim nor as portentous as it sounds...

...He never finishes the sentence and it is up to the reader to finish it for him...

...But God is hard to find, unless you have already found Him...

...Querry is not a leper, but he is a spiritually burnt-out case...

...A "burnt-out case" is a leper who is cured of his disease only after it has eaten away everything that can be eaten away...

...For him, that was enough —but not for Querry...

...He is a burnt-out case and as such is a symbol of man himself...

...A Burnt-Out Case is Graham Greene's simplest novel and probably his most profound: Only a major artist at the height of his power could achieve such perfect simplicity...

...There is Rycker, Querry's nemesis, the man of religious pretensions who is ridiculous, pathetic, maddening and touching...

...Querry, the negative but strangely compelling hero, is not a tragic figure, nor is his violent end tragic...

...There is Madame Rycker, an oddly appealing fool of a girl who, as she wreaks havoc in an attempt to free herself from an unbearable "Christian marriage," serves as Querry's unconscious catalyst...

...Probably it is altogether impertinent to inquire how or why Greene has managed to write a book that in the end turns out to be a spiritual comedy that I can compare with nothing but the best of ?. ?. Forster...

...Did the world, in the end, finally pull him down...

...In this novel everything is channeled into character...

...He has gone as far as he can go without God...

...Graham Greene has never stated his thesis more clearly nor made it easier for the reader to interpret it than he does here...

...If this novel seems to me to be his best, it must be that his deep concern for the salvation of the soul has become more readily comprehensible...

...Or did he escape it...

...From Dr...

...When he dies, it is, perhaps, a matter for argument whether or not he grasped that something more he would have required...

...There is Doctor Colin, a true hero who disbelieves in the heroic, who refuses to believe in God but insists on believing in life...

...In fact, Greene has excelled himself in blending his gift for ironic humor with his gift for portraying Catholic character, so that the result, while it never violates the perfect seriousness of his intentions, is comedy in the true sense of the word...

...His condition comes closer to home...

...Greene makes his points and dramatizes his paradoxes by the juxtaposition of fully realized characters...

...What Greene has to say cannot be separated from the way he says it...

...In the end, when Querry dies, he says, "This is absurd or else...

...But the world persues him even there...

...The tragedy is one of condition...

...Gone is the anger that marred that almost successful novel, The Quiet American, and broke through to spoil the fun in Our Man in Havana...

...Perhaps the reason this new novel seems to me to be Greene's most sympathetic is that it is easier for me and, probably, for most people, to identify themselves with a man like Querry...

...Reviewed by Victor Chapin Author, "The Hill," "The Company of Players" Querry, the hero of Graham Greene's new novel, is a successful man of the world who, having found success meaningless and himself incapable of love, buries himself in a leprosery in the heart of the Congo...

...The familiar ingredients are all here—the disgust of The Heart of the Matter, the romanticized suffering of The End of the Affair—but the flaws are missing...

...Contrast Querry with the priest in Greene's earlier novel, The Power and the Glory: The Mexican priest is a miserable wretch to whom faith gives a final distinction...

...What remains to him is described as an aridity that may or may not be a plateau on the long climb to faith...

...Colin's point of view, this cure was a conviction that life itself, however reduced, however mutilated, is worth preserving...

...There is Father Thomas, hungry for spirituality, who cannot see it where it really exists...

...Querry is a distinguished man to whom the lack of faith brings wretchedness...

...And, ever present, there are the mutilated lepers who go on living with the persistence of life itself...

...Life is absurd without God...

...but, like a great singer in his prime, he has sweetened and deepened his tone...

...No, Greene has not changed his tune...