It's been a good long while since I've achieved such perfect sympathy for a character as I have with Scobie - so much so that I almost completely lost my capacity for joy for three days. I worry what it says about my interior life that I believe it to be impossible for me to so thoroughly connect with a novel in which levity and happiness is a likely outcome. It must be time for a comic palate cleanser or two.

Graham Greene. Damn.