he somewhat forbidding title of Graham Greene's new novel is a term used for those victims of leprosy who can be cured because the disease has eaten about all that it wants -- toes, ears, fingers. They no longer suffer the excruciating pains of those who undergo cure with their bodies intact. Pain is the alternative to mutilation.

"A Burnt-Out Case" is a fascinating study of the relationship of suffering, especially freely accepted suffering -- to wholeness. Greene has set his novel in a remote African leprosery run by nuns and priests. They have as their unexpected guest an internationally famous architect named Querry who arrives incognito, trying to escape as far as possible from his past.

Querry is himself a burnt-out case. He is no longer moved to design a building or sleep with a woman. His love of women was really self-love, and his artistic self-expression was the kind that consumes the self. Even when he was creating modern churches, Querry's art was inhuman, a matter of space and light and textures, with no feeling either for people or prayers. Now whatever fed his vocation has ceased to exist. In his terrible aloneness and deadness he can neither suffer nor laugh.

The novel tells the story of Querry's gradual recovery, or what would have been recovery if the world he tried to flee had let him alone. But a celebrated journalist seeks out Querry, a fat man who "carries his corruption on the surface of his skin like phosphorous." He wants a story that will have the appeal of the stories about Dr. Schweitzer at Lanbarene. With the aid of a neighboring colon, he cooks up a sensational story which falsifies and sentimentalizes the simple, good relationship between Querry and Querry's crippled leper servant. And then Querry's relationship with the colon's pretty young wife is falsified in another way that brings the novel to an ironic and violent close.

The events, however, are less important than the conversations about pain and wholeness, self-love and selflessness, belief and disbelief show a changed and milder mood in Greene. Though this does not necessarily make it a better novel, "A Burnt-Out Case" is free from the theological arrogance, the baiting of rationalists, the melodramatic use of attempted bargains with God which gave a peculiar edge and intensity to Greene's earlier religious fiction. Speaking particularly of his "The End of the Affair," Martin Turnell once wrote: "It is impossible not to be struck by the vast place occupied by hate and the tiny place reserved for charity in the work of contemporary Catholic novelists."

In "A Burnt-Out Case" the balance has shifted. Greene no longer tries to make both humanity and Christianity seem as distasteful as possible. There is ample charity both in the sense of good works and of affectionate understanding.

The sympathetic characters are the religiously uncommitted doctor with his special sense of what Christian love means and the priests who are more interested in curing the natives' bodies that in regulating their sexual mores, who would rather talk about the practicalities of being useful than about the state of each other's souls. The unsympathetic characters are the scrupulously self-righteous. The most repellent character is the spiritually and socially ambitious colon who prides himself on his informed Catholicism. He is a former seminarian, a spoiled priest, morbidly preoccupied with the rights, duties and symbolism of Christian marriage.

Though she plays such an important part in the plot, the colon's young wife is rather lightly sketched in, as are some of the other characters. This is not a novel of great intensity of feeling or one much concerned with the violently changing Africa which is its locale. "A Burnt-Out Case" does not have the color or richness or freshness of detail of "Brighton Rock," "The Power and the Glory" and "The Heart of the Matter." In its quietness, its retrospective air, the parabolic quality of its plot, it is more like Camus' "The Fall." The protagonist's tiredness and detachment affect the novel as a whole. And yet, though Greene does not seem to be trying very hard so far as the story-telling is concerned, though he is not practicing to the full the arts of the novelist, he does nevertheless out of his own humanity make this a very appealing novel, wise, gentle and sympathetic.

And yet, though Greene does not seem to be trying very hard so far as the story-telling is concerned, though he is not practicing to the full the arts of the novelist, he does nevertheless out of his own humanity make this a very appealing novel, wise, gentle and sympathetic.