Looking for an Ending

Abstract

Greene’s two major works of the early 1980s, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) and Monsignor Quixote (1982), ostensibly moved his fictions away from a direct engagement with political affairs and into a distinctly more fabular vein. Described by its author as a ‘black entertainment’ and permeated with the rich melancholy of a dream narrative, Doctor Fischer offers a sparsely constructed parable about the power of wealth to corrupt absolutely.¹ Greene remarked in Ways of Escape that the idea for this novella had suddenly come to him on Christmas Day 1978 during a family lunch in Switzerland. There is, however, no clear consensus over the moral significance (or even genre) of this apparently cautionary tale. Set within the clinical austerity of the super-wealthy of Switzerland, with the multi-millionaire Dr Fischer cast as a high priest of Mammon and Geneva as the faceless centre of international capitalism, this novella blends a variety of narrative forms, including thriller, parable, fable, allegory and love story. Given its domestic origins, it should also be read literally as a Christmas tale and, as Roger Sharrock notes, ‘a Christmas tale is necessarily a fairy story’. Critics have hesitated to define Doctor Fischer as a ‘satire on the greed of the rich or as an allegory of materialistic corruption’ since, as Cedric Watts notes, ‘it remains unconvincing, being so unlikely in its plot and characterisation’.

Greene was always finding new ways to create some useful confusion about his political views.

Shelden, The Man Within, 40