29. A Burnt-Out Case - Graham Greene

Querry is the protagonist in this novel. The story opens with him on a boat with a captain and a priest heading down the West Africa river to a leprosie, where Doctor Colin, an atheist among the Catholic priests treats the lepers. As the story moves along, we hear about Querry's reason for wanting to be down at the end of the river, where there is no more road to go, surrounded by lepers as he wanted to distract himself from the life he had gotten tired of. He needed a cure and this was where he sought a world where no one knew him. The outside world, however, did eventually find him in the form of journalist Parkinson, informed by plantation owner Rycker, whom we found at towards the end of the story needed a sense of significance. Querry had been a successful architect of Catholic churches and a former devout Catholic who believed in God and tried to know love in his own way until he could not live with his inability to make himself believe in the love that he did not know of and was trying to act out. He despised his fame and success and wanted to get away from himself--the life he has believed for himself or who he thinks he is. Marie Rycker, the young wife of Rycker did not enjoy her life in Africa and the non-existent love her husband gave her. At last, she latched on Querry for an escape and put him into a scandal as that was the only way she knew of to escape.

They all needed to be saved from their hearts and the lies they have been believing about themselves, manifested in different ways and made worse as time went on and they did not know how to get out of it. The result was self-destruction or others-destruction in a way that they could not control, as if swimming towards the end of the river without being able to return.

Greene's metaphors for describing things are so clever and the imageries so sharp and penetrating. The way he writes and switches between narration and different persons in conversations is so naturally clear as to who is speaking without having to put name: ".... ".
The way he describes the human condition, the condition of human hearts through these characters is really his form of art and what I love about stories. It will take a second read for me to appreciate the depth and layers he has crafted into each character, as well as the overall metaphor of a "burnt-out-case", as opposed to still being infectious, as first mentioned and explained on p.105 by Colin: "Perhaps Querry is also a patient, ....a burnt-out case," Anyway, it is ambiguous as to whether Querry is actually a burnt-out case or if he actually exudes more faith in his acts.

1-20 Sep 2017
New York: Viking Press, 1960