One of Graham’s rare contemporary admirations, Padre Pio—a south Italian village priest said to be afflicted with the stigmata—asserted that “suffering is the test and testimony of love.” In Greene, however, I think that suffering was a requirement of consciousness itself: an agitation of spirit providing some defence against the dreaded accidie. “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive”—so writes the exhausted protagonist of Graham’s A Burnt-Out Case in the opening sentence of that novel.