"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."Those aren't Graham Greene's words; they come from the finale of the 1962 John Ford western movie classic, The Man Who Shot Libery Valance, and they refer to how a mythos can be created from a lie; how the sad, banal truth rarely stands a chance against the compelling human urge to heroicize, romanticize, mythologize and canonize.In Greene's A Burnt-out Case, his spiritually spent ("burnt-out") and self-denigrating protagonist, Querry--an architect and womanizer who has lost his passions--finds his actions misinterpreted and himself unwittingly proclaimed a hero, even a saint. The irony is that Querry has fled Europe to get away from praise. Feeling prostituted as an architect whose work is compromised and overpraised, and dissolute and disingenuous in his pursuit of sex rather than love, Querry flees to the remotest place he can find: a leper colony deep in the African forest--to hide from the world and from himself, to figure out just who he is and what he really wants to do. Querry is welcomed into the colony, which is run by a Catholic order and staffed by an atheist doctor, Colin, who seems more driven by a sense of scientific duty than by compassion. Not long after arriving, Querry--despite his cynical and blase' facade--commits a simple act of mercy and altruism by spending the night in the swamp with a leper in trouble. Thereafter, nearly everyone ascribes godliness to Querry despite his denials and protestations. His fans include the local palm-oil tycoon Rycker (a self-righteous Christian who follows the letter rather than the spirit of his faith), Dr. Colin, Father Thomas (a priest who questions the strength of his own faith), and a meddlesome newspaper reporter, Parkinson, whose knack for twisting the truth for the sake of good newspaper copy irritates Querry.In his aimless quest for a sense of rootedness, Querry fixates on the inscrutable behavior of his assigned personal assistant, Deo Gratias, a native who has been cured and set free of the leproserie, but who is reluctant to leave and enter a world where the scars of the disease mean social ostracism. Gratias, labeled a burnt-out case because the disease has run its course in its body, is contrasted with and compared to Querry in the novel--both are burnt-out cases in their ways and each seek their respective "Pendele", Gratias' word for a place to belong.During the course of the story, the characters struggle with questions of faith, and the varying degrees and types of adherence to the confusing smorgasbord of biblical, canonical and other religious mandates and precepts--all seemingly interpreted differently according to his or her wont. The fathers, for instance, mostly seem interested in bland practical matters such as accounting and keeping the generator operating, as well as simple earthly pleasures such as card games and wine, to the chagrin of Fr. Thomas, who yearns for a more theological awareness (though not necessarily compassion) and ideological discussions. Rycker salves his conscience and pays his religious respects by donating goods to the leproserie, but treats his own wife in a most condescending way. Some critics of this novel have complained that this is yet another "white men to the fore" novel in which the locals and the exotic locales serve merely as objectified backdrops to a white man's morality play. Such critiques miss the point, I think. By placing white men in a setting in which they are ostensibly altruistic, Greene actually is critiquing white men: white men who are adrift, alienated from a flawed world they created, separated from their homes both in geographical place and in spirit. So, yeah, that's kind of the point. It's part of Greene's critique of white men who have sold out, who are not genuine, who have been rapacious, who have lost their souls and who are trying to find them--and that is not just a struggle for white men, but for everyone.Of the novels I've read by Green so far, this one is the most schematically designed to hammer out issues of the nature of religious faith. The most religious characters are often the most disingenous in their spiritual attitudes and practice and the most heathen are often the most selfless and conscientious. The priests in the novel are not unlike the unethical newspaper reporter, Parkinson, who create saints out of a sinner and who whitewash a bill of goods palatable for the masses (though Parkinson knows he is peddling BS, unlike the priests). Ironically, it is an action in which Querry is blameless that brings him down, ultimately, and again it is because everyone around him chooses to believe what they want to believe, rather than the truth. Such can be faith.Taking biblical allusion to perhaps an unsubtle plane, the downfall of Querry is tied to a woman. The Eve of the story is Marie, Rycker's emotionally abused and romantically unsatisfied wife. Even though Querry does not lay a hand on her, it is his "saintliness" to her that ironically brings him down; a kind of karmic revenge for the trail of broken hearts he left behind in Europe.The novel for about 30 percent of the way is the most perfectly modulated I've ever read, but when the pedantic discussions of faith begin the book becomes less subtle and starts to feel like a philosophical sounding board for Greene. But the discussions are good ones, chock full of food for thought, and, even though I would not rank this quite as highly as The Comedians or The Quiet American, I still can't bring myself to give this less than five stars. Maybe four and a half. I wanted to incorporate the following choice quotes from the novel into the review, but time is short (maybe tomorrow), and I'm off to read another Greene. I include these as an addendum:p.52Querry to Rycker:I once had (children), but they disappeared into the world a long time ago. We haven't kept in touch. Self expression eats the father in you, too.p.57(Querry wrote in his journal, in an attempt to make clear his motives to Dr. Colin:)"A vocation is an act of love: it is not a professional career. When desire is dead one cannot continue to make love. I've come to the end of desire and to the end of a vocation. Don't try to bind me in a loveless marriage and to make me imitate what I used to perform with passion. And don't talk to me like a priest about my duty. A talent -- we used to learn that lesson as children in scripture lessons -- should not be buried when it still has purchasing power, but when the currency has changed and the image has been superseded and no value is left in the coin but the weight of a wafer of silver, a man has every right to hide it. Obsolete coins, like corn, have always been found in graves."p.90Querry:"...but surely there's also something about having to be as little children if we are to inherit...We've grown up rather badly. The complications have become too complex - we should have stopped with the amoeba - no, long before that with the silicates. If your god wanted an adult world he should have given us an adult brain.""You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you can't steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn't Christian, self-sacrifice isn't Christian, charity isn't, remorse isn't. I expect the caveman wept to see another's tears. Haven't you even seen a dog weep? In the last cooling of the world, when the emptiness of your belief is finally exposed, there'll always be some bemused fool who'll cover another's body with his own to give it warmth for an hour more of life."p.96(The Superior, giving a sermon in local dialect):"And I tell you the truth I was ashamed when this man said to me, 'You Klistians are all big thieves—you steal this, you steal that, you steal all the time. Oh, I know you don't steal money. You don't creep into Thomas Olo's hut and take his new radio set, but you are thieves all the same. Worse thieves than that. You see a man who lives with one wife and doesn't beat her and looks after her when she gets a bad pain from medicines at the hospital, and you say that's Klistian love. You go to the courthouse and you hear a good judge, who says to the piccin that stole sugar from the white man's cupboard, 'You're a very sorry piccin. I not punish you, and you, you will not come here again. No more sugar palaver,' and you say that's Klistian mercy. But you are a mighty big thief when you say that— for you steal this man's love and that man's mercy. Why do you say when you see man with knife in his back bleeding and dying, 'There Klistian anger?' . . . 'Why not say when Henry Okapa got a new bycicle and someone came and tore his brake, "There's Klistian envy." You are like a man who steals only the good fruit and leaves the bad fruit rotting on the tree.' When you love, it is Yezu who loves, when you are merciful it is Yezu who is merciful. But when you hate or envy it is not Yezu, for everything that Yezu made is good . . . "p.135"Would you write the truth, Parkinson, even if I told it to you? I know you wouldn't. You aren't burnt-out after all. You are still infectious."p. 136 querry to Parkinson:"In my heart of course I had left the Church years before, but she never realized that. I believed a little of course, like so many do, at the major feasts, Christmas and Easter, when memories of childhood stir us to a kind of devotion.""...in the end most women reach their climax most easily in the commonest position of all and with the commonest phrase upon the tongue."p.138"To build a church when you don't believe in a god seems a little indecent, doesn't it?"p.142Parkinson: "I'm going to build you up. I'll build you up so high they'll raise a statue to you by the river...I wouldn't be surprised if there were pilgrims at your shrine in twenty years, and that's how history is written."p.151Colin to Querry:"Wouldn't you rather suffer than feel discomfort? Discomfort irritates our ego like a mosquito-bite. We become aware of ourselves, the more uncomfortable we are, but suffering is quite a different matter. Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition. With suffering we become part of the Christian myth."p.181Rycker said,"Saints used to be made by popular acclaim. I'm not sure that it wasn't a better method than a trial in Rome. We have taken you up, Querry. You don't belong to yourself anymore. You lost yourself when you prayed with that leper in the forest."p.196Querry, to Marie"The fact that his jewels ceased to be popular with the people in general only made him more popular with the connoisseurs who distrust popular success."p.214 (Querry to Marie Rycker, about the nuns)"Oh, they are professionals. They believe anything. Even the Holy House of Loretto. They ask us to believe too much and then we believe less and less.""You can brainwash yourself into anything you want – even into marriage or a vocation...Then the years pass and the marriage or the vocation fails and it's better to get out. It's the same with belief. People hang on to a marriage for fear of a lonely old age or to a vocation for fear of poverty. It's not a good reason. And it's not a good reason to hang on to the Church for the sake of some mumbo jumbo when you come to die."p.237Father Jean to Father Thomas:"Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave the man the sexual instinct."p.240Querry: "Disgust of praise. How it nauseates, doctor, by its stupidity. The very people who ruined my churches were loudest afterwards in their praise of what I'd built. The books they have written about my work, the pious motives they've attributed to me--they were enough to sicken me of the drawing-board....the praise of priests and pious people--the Ryckers of the world."p.245Dr. Colin:"Success is like that too--a mutilation of the natural man."
Like most of Greene's books, I'm going to have to cook on this one for a while to figure out what it was really about and what I think of it. Famous architect Querry flees to remotest Africa to escape... I'm not sure what exactly. Falsehood. Meta-narratives; fantasy stories. Fame. Success. Romance. Religion. Maybe they're all facets of the same thing, something I don't have a word for. He's the burnt out case in the title, and Greene frequently equates him with the lepers around him, though I don't think I fully understand the metaphor. He finds peace and purpose designing a simple hospital for a leper colony. He is enjoying a simple life, simple relationships, and simple work. This, I think, is healing his soul. He is able to laugh again, though it's an odd sound, and to care about people. But then an act of kindness, from one perspective a foolish act, because he's not thinking about what it's bound to look like to other people, leads to his death. And I guess maybe that's the point. He wants to escape the public eye, the perception of others, the invention of stories and hearsay and supposition about motives and acts. But it's impossible to escape all that completely. There is no such thing as a simple act - an act that stands in and of itself, free of interpretation. The world watches, and judges, whether you want them to or not. And.. I don't know. Maybe there's more. It seems to me like Querry is overly simplistic, thinking he can escape the complexity of religion and cathedrals and just do good works among lepers, as if that's not just as complex as building a cathedral in Belgium. But ultimately, it's not just the perception of his kind act that gets him killed, it's the woman he helps, and the way she decides to manipulate that act to get what she wants. As you can see, I'll be thinking through this one, turning it over and over in my mind, for a while. And that's what I like about Greene; he doesn't preach. He has things to say, he has an astounding moral imagination, but the answers aren't simplistic or overcooked - if there are answers. The questions his novels present are compelling.
What do You think about A Burnt Out Case (2001)?
"The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life" (28)."'Why did he give us genitals, then, if he wanted us to think clearly?'" (72)."But Rycker was like a wall so plastered over with church announcements that you couldn't even see the brick-work behind" (142).“‘It’s a penalty of genius to belong to the world’” (142).“But Rycker was like a wall so plastered over with church announcements that you couldn’t even see the brick-work behind” (142).“‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘that I’m eating enough for two.’“‘I won’t.’“‘It’s the stock colon joke, you know, for someone with worms’” (161).“‘Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct’” (186).“‘After all, it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who said that he made the world in play’” (186).“‘You’re too troubled by your lack of faith, Querry. You keep on fingering it like a sore you want to get rid of’” (189).“‘Unpleasantness...you have a wonderful capacity, Brother Philippe, for understatement’” (191).“The last sentence stuck out like a pair of legs from beneath the rubble” (191).
—Katherine
Greene- what a writer! This book, an exploration of the experience of [another] tortured Catholic, is just so intense. The setting is a leper hospital run by European missionaries in the African Congo. The characters all profess to be living a life of meaning.Their differing levels of self-awareness impact on their capacities to understand the main character, a brilliant architect,a builder of cathedrals, now desperate to shed his past and to live in peace. Leprosy is a metaphor for whatever in modern society has mutilated his natural self. There is irony in the fact that the one person who understands him is the atheist doctor. The book is full of beautifully drawn descriptions, observations and ironies. A strong statement, overall, on the intricacy of the psychic capacity for faith. Could bear a 2nd reading.
—Margaret1358 Joyce
Here again comes Greene wrestling with important questions related to religion: the loss of faith, the place of suffering in healing, and the insidious disease of pride. The novel takes on the languid manner of the protagonist, Querry, thus becoming more of an opportunity for contemplation of the questions than a thrilling, page-turning narrative.Most interesting among the questions Greene explores through these characters involves the role of suffering in the healing process, that pain is a sign of life, and its lack in our lives is one of the great tragedies of modern living. Greene ends the novel in an effectively ironic fashion, which both engenders sympathy for the strange character of Querry and provides a chillingly accurate portrait of a man controlled by religious pride.
—John
