Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party

Published 1980

Jones is from England but works as a translator for a chocolate company in Lausanne, Switzerland. He meets Anna-Luise Fischer due to a mistake at a sandwich shop. Their conversation leads to friendship. And when Jones finds Anna-Luise falling in love with him, a much older man, he does not hesitate to propose. The newlyweds live a happy life, taking walks, playing cards, buying furniture and household gadgets, with skiing on the weekends for Anna-Luise. They are even planning to have a baby. The only result of this union that is not happy is the time that Jones spends with Anna-Luise’s father, Doctor Fischer, and his friends.

Doctor Fischer is a wealthy man and generous with his friends. He invites them to dinner parties and gives them expensive gifts, specially chosen for each of them. At each party, Doctor Fischer also takes care to humiliate each guest. In fact, the parties are experiments Doctor Fischer conducts to assess how much humiliation wealthy people will accept in order to ensure that they get a valuable prize to which they have grown accustomed. Anna-Luise calls her father’s friends, Toads.

Anna-Luise would be happy never to see her father again. She has never forgiven him for his treatment of her mother, whom she is convinced died of grief. But Jones feels a certain responsibility to get to know his father-in-law. After the wedding, which the Doctor did not attend, Jones pays him a visit. The Doctor doesn’t pay much attention to his son-in-law, but since Jones is English, the Doctor does ask him questions about porridge. He also invites Jones to his next party.

Jones attends the party and witnesses the humiliation of the Toads. But since he doesn’t humiliate himself, he goes home without a prize. He promises Anna-Luise that he will never attend another of the Doctor’s parties. But a few tragic months later, Jones finds himself at what the Doctor calls his final party. And this time Jones is trying to claim one of the prizes.

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Greene’s previous two novels, The Honorary Consul and The Human Factor, were grounded in the brutal reality of their respective subjects: whether geography, politics, or the routine of espionage. This macabre short novel, in contrast, is an exploration of grotesques which does not depend at all on its Swiss background. It is a novel that explores a strange idea. In that way, this novel resembles several of Greene’s short stories more than it does any of his other novels.