 "Bearing An Unwanted Cross" | 2008-12-04 |
| - Reviewed By slokes@optonline.net |
Graham Greene's interest in moral fiction extended beyond being a so-called "Catholic author", or at least he liked to think it did. His 1961 novel "A Burnt-Out Case" shows him trying to manage the distinction in the guise of a novel, but, alas, a lack of sympathetic interest and a labored touch bring it down.
We're off to a bad start when the lead character goes by the pregnantly interrogative name of "Querry" and is taking the Conrad route through deepest Africa on a mission of which he refuses to say very much. He makes landfall at a leper aid station, as far as he can go, he is told, where an group of Catholic clergy and an atheistic doctor do what they can for the social flotsam before them. Querry, a non-believer himself, finds himself as much a patient as a caregiver.
According to Wikipedia, this was a dark time in Greene's own life, and you can detect in Querry echoes of Greene wrestling both with his spirituality and with his literary fame. Querry is an architect, a builder of cathedrals in a distinctly modernist, even brutalist, style, who feels decidedly alienated from his past creation and the spirit which is supposed to fill them.
"Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing," he tells the sympathetic doctor. "It eats everything, even the self. At the end, you find you haven't even got a self to express."
These of course feel more like the words of a writer than an architect, and throughout the book, you sense that Greene is trying to slam the door on his Catholic past, by presenting most of the religious characters in varying shades of unpleasantness, by challenging the notion of a loving God, by presenting a world devoid of grace. Yet the door won't stay closed, and Greene winds up giving us a character who is at some level in conflict with his own denial of God.
This is all good for subtext, and interesting for Greene biographers. What if you just want a good story? "A Burnt-Out Case" never seems to get going in that direction. Querry takes on the task of designing a new hospital, and forms a glancing relationship with one leper. Meanwhile, a reporter and a factory owner take an undue interest in Querry's presence at the leproserie, given his famous past, which leads to many uncomfortable complications. This becomes Greene's main plotline, feeling way too forced long before lurching to a predictable end.
The strength of Greene in other novels, both those that use Catholicism directly ("Power And The Glory", "Brighton Rock") and those that don't ("Our Man In Havana", "The Third Man") is his ability to involve us in the central characters' inner moral lives through exterior incident and circumstance, not to mention relations with their fellow men. But the characters here mostly tend toward trotting out pet notions of life rather than existing on their own steam. The one leper we know by name (and what a name, "Deo Gratius"!) disappears almost entirely from the last two-thirds of the story, while the rest of the lepers never emerge into anything worth caring for. Most of the conversation is philosophical and abstract.
Some good lines with personal resonances for Greene ("It's a penalty of genius to belong to the world") and one decently miserably character in the factory owner, Rycker, an overly pious character who blames his wife for his thin outpourings of lust, don't compensate for a sense one is eavesdropping on the author talking to himself from the psychiatrist's sofa or the priest's confessional. "A Burnt-Out Case" catches Graham Greene in exactly the title state. |
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 "Another Greene Hero Bites The Dust" | 2006-09-01 |
| - Reviewed By martinasiner |
| The fiction of Graham Greene is filled with protagonists who are deposited in exotic locations and confronted by an external evil that puts those men to a test of faith and hope, one that requires them to compare what they have inside to see if they have what is needed to pass from that void of spiritual inertia. Greene also adds religious crisis to his heroes' brew of troubles. The usual result is that his protagonists fail to achieve their desired state of an ordered mind. They tend to remain in a static limbo of paralyzed hope. In A BURNT OUT CASE, Querry is the prototypical hero who suffers from a crisis of lost hope. Querry is a famed architect who suffers from an unnamed crisis that probably has something to do with excessive relations with loose women and a lack of connection to God. We never learn all the details of his life before he shows up unannounced at a leper colony in Africa nor do we need to. Greene inserts bits and pieces of Querry's background, the totality of which paints a more detailed portrait than if he had more fully fleshed out Querry's past. Querry simply shows up at that leper colony, asking to stay, and is willing to perform any menial task that he is given. The doctors in charge quickly figure out who he is and marvel at his apparent readiness to shed his famed background and assume the non-identity of a nomad. Querry is indeed a hurt man, but not the type that usually shows up to be cured, most of whom are called "burnt out cases," because they have endured both physical and psychic mutilation. In Querry's case, the mutilation, though internal, is no less real than that of the other sufferers. The doctors realize this and let him stay. They see in Querry less a mutilated man in need of help than an architect whose skills can help them rebuild their dilapidated buildings. Querry tries to blend in, but in his interactions with both staff and patients, it becomes clear that not only can he not shed his earlier emotional baggage but he is forced to assume some new baggage as well. Querry is accused by a woman of getting her pregnant. She admits to him privately that she did indeed lie but in her own mind the lie was justified. To complicate this charge is Querry's ongoing need to debate whether he needs God to be happy. He decides that happiness or its opposite need have nothing to do with the intervention of either God or the church. The church fathers quickly decide that the paternity charge is reason enough to ostracize him. A subtle irony is that the church fathers and doctors were more than willing to believe the best of Querry without substantiation and were just as willing to believe the worst with an equal lack. The ending, which I shall not reveal here, is one that we have seen before in Greene's other novels. His heroes enter the book as hurt, confused, and seeking inner peace. In the world of Graham Greene, they sadly all too often exit the same way. Sort of like in real life. |
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 "Very short, but very good" | 2006-07-17 |
| - Reviewed By dr_rizz |
This was the first Graham Greene novel that I have read, and considering his reputation as a Catholic author, I suspect A Burnt-Out Case is not very representative of his more famous, earlier works (which I hope to read soon). A lot of the reviews here compare this novel to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but aside from the mutual setting of Africa, I don't really see much of a thematic connection. The novel that I was most strikingly reminded of, actually, was Camus' The Plague. In both novels we see men faced with a world of suffering and disease and their various attempts (religion, philosophy, etc) to combat the senselessness of it all. Ultimately, Greene's novel is a strongly atheistic work, echoing the famous line from Camus' novel (that I can only paraphrase): 'I refuse to love a God that causes children to suffer.' Greene's novel, despite being a slim 196 pages, has a lot more depth and a lot more issues to deal with than this one, however. The main character, Querry, is a fascinating study of the effects of fame on an artist (presumably reflecting Greene's own struggles after his own success), and there are a lot of parallels between physical and spiritual disease.
This probably isn't the best book to start with if you've never read anything by Greene before, but I highly reccomend it, particularly to those interested in philosophical fiction along the lines of Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc. |
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| "The chronicle of a man's consciousness and anxiety" | 2006-06-27 |
| - Reviewed By phorak@gibz.ch |
A remote leproserie in the Congo is the place where the protagonists meet in this novel by Graham Greene: Dr Colin, Querry, the Ryckers, Parkinson and Father Thomas. In the author's own words, in a letter addressed to Docteur Michel Lechat, the situation in the novel is an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half belief and non-belief, in the kind of setting removed from world politics and household-preoccupations, where such differences are felt acutely and find expression. Indeed, exigencies of faith seem to be of little help in a place like the Congo in the 1950s, beset with disease and death as it then was.
The corrupting presence of the journalist Montagu Parkinson who comes in search of the architect Querry and who alters the truth to hype things up is the reason why A Burnt-Out Case continues to be relevant today. This is also why this novel resembles Heart Of Darkness by J. Conrad and parallels can be drawn between Querry and Marlow: both have a sense of moral disgust and inner desolation. Thus Querry retreats to a kind of hell, the leprosarium, and finds a peace of sorts there, a respite that comes to and end with the arrival of Parkinson. Nevertheless Querry himself becomes a burnt-out case in the end, like a leper whose disease has run its course.
Strong, powerful prose by one of the greatest British writers of the 20th century. |
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| "Dark Hearts And Greenland" | 2006-02-20 |
| - Reviewed By User: A30MYS9FDEF9SZ |
Graham Greene novels are like pizza. Even the bad ones are good.
And this one is far from bad. Granted, it's another journey into life's laments, which Greene is exceptionally skilled at, but like the best of
his other work, the journey is filled with interesting sojourners you're
pleased to spend a couple of hundred pages with. And happily, his storytelling prowess and dramatic plotting are both fellow journeymen as well.
In Burnt Out Case, Greene takes us deep into Africa, and the parallels to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are easily made. But Greene's story of lepers and healers and builders and believers is its own. Replete with the lies, misunderstandings, regrets and revenge that often populate Green's pages, you can rest assured that not unlike life, what can go wrong, will. go But in the hands of a skilled writer like Greene, you consider yourself lucky for having been along for the ride.
Burnt Out Case is well worth a dark trip down the winding river of men's souls. |
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| "The Maker's Heavy Hand" | 2005-03-31 |
| - Reviewed By bestgb |
Graham Greene wrote novels of ideas. In the best of his books, such as The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, the ideas evolve out of the acts of characters reacting to believable situations. When the ideas and the actions aren't so seamlessly fused, the books, while still worth reading, feel more schematic. This, unfortunately, is the case with A Burnt-Out Case.
Querry is an architect who has become world-renowned for designing churches and other religious structures. We first see him on a boat churning its way up a muddy river in the middle of Africa. Its last stop is a leper colony run by priests and nuns, and here Querry disembarks. He's trying to flee to a place where he can be alone with his own disease, which is an inability to feel normal human emotion. But even in the bush, he can't outrun his fame. The priests and colonists he encounters keep ascribing holy motives to him, despite all his protests than he's beyond love of god, career, or other humans.
In another Greene novel, The Heart of the Matter, Scobie is a Catholic policeman in colonial Africa troubled by issues of faith. In his review of the book, George Orwell complained about the incompatible parts of Scobie's character. If Scobie was as devoted a Catholic as Greene made him out to be, he wouldn't have committed such big sins against his faith. If he was truly a career police officer, he wouldn't have been such an unworldly Catholic. Querry's character is similarly dichotomous. If he's as burnt-out as he claims to be, he wouldn't get so involved with the leprosarium, its doctor, (Colin), and Marie Rycker the young wife of a colonist who deeply admires Querry. If he's as compassionate as he appears to be, he can't be as emotionally dead as Greene wants us to believe he is.
The ending of the book plays out the consequences of Querry's kindness to Rycker's wife. It feels forced; a character as complex as Querry deserves a more complex dénouement.
Greene was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. The craft and penetrating intellect he brought to everything he wrote make this book worth reading. Its portrayal of the priests is diverting, especially their attempts to use Querry for their own political purposes. And Colin, the atheistic doctor who befriends Querry, is a character we care about. But we see too clearly the heavy hand of the puppet master, which makes A Burnt-Out Case a second tier novel from a top-tier novelist.
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