What on earth is Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party all about? Can it really be, as one reviewer believes, ‘a bitter little parable about the subservience of the rich to riches; about the despair that deepens so much every day one lives, that death in the end seems to lose its point; about the ephemerality of happiness; and about the way in which a man may finally come to despise himself so much that life becomes intolerable for him’. Seen like this, Graham Greene’s story-parable — for it certainly cannot be considered an orthodox novel — is remarkably thin and — in many respects — uninformative. There is, for example, very little serious discussion of the attitude of wealthy people to money: that gradual debilitating disease of judgment and balance which leaves the victim convinced of imminent poverty, or the stealthy atrophying of every generous impulse. It is hard to find anything to do with money that could not have been more adequately examined in a normal domestic setting of the type found in Bennett or Galsworthy, or the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility. Neither, I am sure, would it be useful to assume that Mr Greene constructed his parable with the object of indulging his well-known interest in Russian roulette — a version of which forms the prize-winning entertainment at the last of Dr Fischer’s parties. There is a sense in which the explanations and commentaries do not seem to be able to account for the material, and yet given the brevity and apparent simplicity of the text this adds what can reasonably be regarded as a further curtain of bewilderment.