peteg's blog - noise - books - 2017 05 01 Greene ABurntOutCase

Graham Greene: A Burnt Out Case.

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Kindle. A not-too-long novel from 1960 that I completed on the plane from Doha to Sydney. Mostly Greene sticks to his usual preoccupations (Catholicism, colonialism, journalism, character sketches, scenery, the exotic, suffering and hypocrisy, power plays) so there's a lot of talking but not action. We're in the Congo, at a Belgian leproserie, where the new drugs are eradicating the scourge of millenia and a womanizing architect seeks isolation from the maddening world. The gun that goes off in Part V was never on the table. In some ways it has a similar structure to, and is less successful than, his canonical The Quiet American.

Robert Gorham Davis reviewed it back in the day.