Customer Reviews

A Burnt-Out Case.

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Greene employs themes of faith and unbelief of all kinds in this novel. As with most of Greene's serious works, it's not easily read; if you want to be comfortable, try his "entertainments", and yet I wouldn't even guarantee that those novels wouldn't leave you feeling unease.

Essentially, this is the story of a famous architect who runs away from civilization to a leper colony in Africa. He wants the world to forget him entirely, but the world will not leave him to anonymity. Even in the leper colony his deeds are misinterpreted to be perhaps greater--or at least other--than what they actually were. A doubting priest siezes on Querry's kindness to an injured man as proof of Querry's saintliness; a venal yellow journalist broadcasts Querry's run from the world as the selfless work of another Schweitzer. Just about everything Querry does, whether purposely or inadvertently, is misconstrued by those around him who somehow need to elevate him above themselves as proof that God or good exists. In the end, in true Greene fashion, this situation is ironically reversed; those who at first would believe only in Querry's sainthood come to believe an outright lie about him, much to their disappointment and outrage and Querry's own end.

What did I take away from this? Good literature remains relevant throughout the years; what was true in 1961 is true in 2000 and was true a millenium ago. We build up our saints and heroes (and politicians) often with our own desires, whether they have done anything good or not and tear them down just as arbitrarily. More than that: truth exists, goodness exists, but we in our human weakness (and often unwittingly) find ways to distort that truth and goodness to our own purposes.

Gloopygirls assessment? I liked the book. I'm not about to canonize Green--or gleefully tear him down. I'm not qualified either way--but I know what I like...

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.

I've been a fan of Greene's for a while now, and so far, I haven't read a bad book. This may be one of his better ones, and that's saying a lot. He is, perhaps, the best and most consistent novelist of the twentieth century.

This is the story of Querry, a famous architect, who realizes he has lost (or never) had the ability to love. He feels nothing but indifference. That is when he embarks into the African jungle looking for escape (or redemption). He lives at a leproserie run by priests, becomes friends with Dr. Colin, and becomes something of a burnt-out case.

Greene is just a superb writer. He has so many sentences and passages, that had he written just that one, someone would have remembered him. His characters are complex and honest depictions. Lastly, his themes of love, faith, redemption, pain, and truth are the great ones. A lot of authors are scared to tackle them or knowingly cannot tackle them. Greene can and does.

I'm reviewing this book because I see it differently from all other reviews I've read. I've seen it described as bleak, disenchanted, dis-everything, but they never mention the humor.

Yes, I think this book is funny. Scathingly, satirically, mercilessly funny. Now, I honestly don't know how I'd describe this book to a friend: "This guy gets sick of life in general and drops out to live in a leper colony in Africa...you'll laugh your head off!" Doesn't sound right, does it?

I guess it's just schadenfreude, taking delight from another person's pain. Which isn't as awful as it sounds; most of the pain Querry goes through is high irritation caused by people insisting that they know his true nature...and as far as the guy is concerned, they couldn't be more wrong. It's a comedy of errors, like Candide or The Lavender Hill Gang:
"You're loving! You're saintly! You have strong faith in God. Hey, I hear you're going to build a church!"
"What in the hell are you talking about? I think religion is a crock, I seduce and dump women, and people in general make me retch. I'm a jerk!"
"And you're so humble, too."
"AAAGH!"

These people see what they want to see in Querry; he keeps trying to set them straight and fails; he keeps giving up and walking away. Querry regards it as a pain in the posterior, but he doesn't lose any sleep over it. You can laugh at it the way you'd laugh at someone trying to hang wallpaper one-handed or supervise a roomful of screaming preschoolers. It's hopeless. When the reporter shows up to write a baloney-filled article about Querry's 'saintly' quest, Querry seems to find the guy a bit refreshing--because the reporter's a liar, but at least he *knows* he's a liar! (The reporter creates whatever his audience wants to hear; think Rita Skeeter. There, I've compared a Graham Greene novel to Harry Potter. The Internet will now explode.)

I say, read this book with an eye to the ridiculous side of the plot. There's a lot here to like; gorgeous sarcasm, black humor, and a character with an attitude from Hell. It bites like a wolf right down to the last line on the last page, and I loved it.

This was the first book I ever read from Greene. I loved it so much that I did read many more, all of which unfortunately paled in comparison. It is very intensely written, and can be read on many levels and interpreted from many different angles. It talks of faith and redemption, vanity and envy, joy and despair. Highly reccomended.

This is a very good novel, and it is very good because it touches eternal subjects and so will be able to be read and understood for many years to come. What are these subjects? Faith, God, goodness, sainthood, vocation, love and despair.

Querry is a very famous architect who at some point in his life feels a depressive boredom about love and his profession. he feels he has never been able to really love a woman, although money and fame have brought many of them to his bed, and he feels a total disdain for religion. So, feeling a terrible void in his life, and being sick of all those people adulating him and writing things that come only from their imaginations, he decides to run away from it all.

Choosing a destination by chance, he finds himself in a leprosary deep into "the heart of darkness", in Congo. There, he feels relieved of people's false and volatile attention, and dedicates his energies to help out the priests, building a new hospital for them. He feels coming back to life again, doing something useful for people with a terrible, but now curable, disease. He finds the good company of Dr. Colin (my type of hero) and some of the priests. "Far from the madding crowd", he starts rebuilding his connections to humankind, out of totally unselfish motivations.

And then... the stupid fools appear on stage. There are three of them: Rycker, a most unlikable man who has a very young and unhappy wife, the kind of fool who professes to love humankind but is unable to love the specific humans around him. Rycker spreads the word about Querry's identity and spreads also ridiculous stories about his supposed sainthood.
Father Thomas, a nervous wreck of a man who also insists on Querry's sainthood. And finally, a despicable reporter, Parkinson, who starts publishing yellow and distorted articles about Querry. in the end, all this accumulates in the wrong way.

Full of deep but unpretentious reflections on the said subjects, this is a truly a novel of ideas and of hard dilemmas. Well recommended.

There are many similarities between this novel and Conrad's masterly novella. The protagonist, Querry, like Marlowe, is making a voyage of discovery into the deepest interior of the "Dark Continent." The voyage upriver is even described in much the same manner, as the missionary boat wends its way into an ever more torpid, oppresive atmosphere.

Green contrasts the colonial attitudes as represented by the figure of the greedy, exploitative Ryker, with the benevolent,if scattershod, efforts of Father Thomas and the priests and nuns of the leper colony. Though Ryker is far less megalomaniacal than Kurtz, and a lot less intelligent, he too is guided ny notions of entitlement and superiority. This mindset extends to his notions of marriage as well. His young wife has about as much status, in his eyes, as have the natives employed in the Palm Oil production plant he supervises.

Ryker also shares much in common with the hotel keeper, Schomberg, in Conrad's Victory. Both are of the "ugly European" variety, motivated by self interest and subject not to genuine passion, but to wounded vanity. Self pride and grandiose imaginings are all either man has. Querry, in A Burnt Out Case, and Heyst, in Victory, are precisely the opposite. These protagonists have essentially lost their identities. They travel to the ends of the earth in an attempt to discover what manner of men they actually are. Querry's end, like Heyst's is almost preordained, yet they do finally discover some semblance of truth about themselves.

Greene was not at all happy with the manner in which this book was interpreted by critics and by the public. He blames it and Heart of the Matter, for his having been subsequently labeled a "Catholic" writer. In Ways of Escape, he writes that the book's publication resulted in an outflow of enthusiastic responses: " There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers -- perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired." The novel continues, as does much of Greene's oevre, to attract criticism keyed into spiritual and religious themes. That obviously wasn't his intent, and I believe that he deserves a less "catholic" (in its dictionary and religious sense) reading by modern audiences. Though I prefer some of Greene's other works (personal favorites, The Comedians, The Power and the Glory), I recommend this as a highly readable, diverting novel, with enough psychological underpinnings to lend it depth.

BEK

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.

Graham Greene often strikes readers as being a prolific writer of genre novels. In an unreaderly time, it's amazing that his works still arouse responses of curiosity, attention, and debate to an extent that is deeper than what entertainment novels usually ensue. Reflecting the style of many other works, Greene invests in A BURNT-OUT CASE a moral dilemma that gives it an edge of seriousness and a whiff of suspense. Combining his rich travel experience with a style of the utmost calm, lucidity and simplicity, A BURNT-OUT CASE concerns a man who escapes life and his successful career as an architect and seeks refuge in a Congo leproserie.

Querry is emotionally marooned - he suffers from nothing and loses touch with love, sentiment, and suffering. Humanity has no grabble on him. He is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a burnt-out leprosy case, a leper who has undergone mutilation before he can be cured. Querry arrives anonymously and discreetly at the village looking for meaning in life. He might have lost his capacity to love but his scruple retains. The ex-architect has plunged to the bottom of his life (to the point of no return) when he realizes for his entire life he has not loved. The remorse in him motivates to come in terms with suffering, for suffering is the only measure one has to put himself in touch with the whole human condition.

A BURNT-OUT CASE strives to make a daring connection between failure to love and religious hypocrisy. Querry realizes his lack of love and he cannot even pretend that what he has been feeling in life is love. The motives for work, life, or anything, fail him and the ultimate crisis settles in: his life has been deprived of meaning. The moment he perceives the emptiness he has been lifted off the pit and is spurred toward love and good deeds. What Greene strives to convey is that one who has found love no longer has to elaborate that love to others. The novel subtly ridicules the absurdity in which Christianity would always presume and appropriate man's love and attribute man's good deeds to Christian love. So Christianity takes credit for all the good fruits and leave behind the evil doings. This blunt denial of any good that exists outside of Christian faith engenders hypocrisy.

A BURNT-OUT CASE therefore affords an audacious (but valid) claim that is possible for a man of intelligence, modesty, honesty, and remorse to make his life without a god. The claim adumbrates a borderline existentialist tenet, which believes in an individualism that is free from any social and external influence in order to achieve autonomous decision-making in life and ultimately giving a tight grip on one's fate. The beauty of the novel lies in the fact that it does man's volition justice through Querry's transformation to love labor. The novel neither scorns Christianity nor the deeds impelled by the religious faith, but it expounds love that is purely humane and love that is not institutionalized or labeled.

The struggle between hypocrisy and pure love becomes very evident as the underlying pride, deceit, and bitterness culminate in a riotous violence that jolts the quiet village. The novel exposes what most religious people do not wish to confront: the re-examination, and possibly the renewal of love at the painfully unbearable realization of the cruel truth that they do not love despite all the scrupulous church-going and the lip worship. For such philosophical terrain the novel seeks to tackle, Graham Greene had accomplished more than an entertainment novel.

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.