Graham Greene’s Squid Game

'Squid Game' has topped the charts in 80 countries. (Image: screen grab)

Netflix’s new Korean offering, Squid Game, is grim, gruesome, and gripping. It’s topped the charts in over 80 countries and is set to become the biggest series in the channel’s history. “It’s still trending up,” Netflix vice-president Min-young Kim recently said. “We’ve never seen anything grow as fast and aggressive.” (Like a virus variant, then.)

Though creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s addictive show is notable for the way it depicts savage survival strategies, set-ups that literally eliminate contestants have, of course, often been tried before. Even Bollywood got into the act: in 2009, there was a film called Luck, which was a loose adaptation of Intacto, a fantastical Spanish thriller about deadly games of chance to identify people who are born lucky.

Before all of these, there was Doctor Fischer of Geneva, a 1984 film in which James Mason plays an eponymous doctor who is driven to explore just how far his fellow humans will go to satisfy their avarice. The movie was based on one of Graham Greene’s last novels, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party.

It’s evident from his other work that the author knew more than a little something about chance and survival. There’s also the often-cited story of Gabriel García Márquez once asking Greene whether it was true that he had played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. Greene is supposed to have replied that he had, and more than once.

“I think that I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman.” That’s the arresting first sentence of the short novel, which is narrated by the doctor’s son-in-law.

It deals with Doctor Fischer, a man who has amassed a fortune by creating a brand of toothpaste in Switzerland, and his parties for affluent guests referred to as Toads, short for toadies. In his palatial mansion outside Geneva, this group of actors, lawyers, and other expatriates are made to undergo a series of humiliations and tests, at the end of which they receive expensive presents.

At one such party, for instance, guests are served live lobsters that they have to cook in bowls of boiling water, taking care to not be burnt or nipped. It all culminates in the so-called Bomb Party during Christmas, in which six guests are asked to choose crackers that are kept at a safe distance.

The doctor announces that five of these crackers contain cheques for two million Swiss francs, and the sixth has a small explosive device lethal enough to kill the person who pulls it. As the guests ponder the odds of this form of Russian roulette, they are taunted by their misanthropic host whom the narrator hates for “his pride, his contempt of all the world, and his cruelty”.

Both Squid Game and Doctor Fischer of Geneva are critiques of a prevailing state of affairs, with dangerous game-playing at the core. That apart, there clearly are organic differences between them.

The former is cast as a brutal commentary on inequality and an untethered capitalist system (because of which it’s also been compared to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite). With Greene’s novel, the starting point is the covetousness of those who are already wealthy. As the doctor pithily puts it, “All my friends are rich and the rich are the greediest”.

More than that, though, Doctor Fischer of Geneva can be read as a twisted religious allegory. For a start, the doctor’s name has overtones of the Biblical “fishers of men”, a phrase used to summon Jesus’s early disciples.

There’s also more than one conversation on the nature of God. “The believers and the sentimentalists say that he is greedy for our love,” says the doctor to his son-in-law in one passage. “I prefer to think that, judging from the world he is supposed to have made, he can only be greedy for our humiliation, and that greed how could he ever exhaust?”

Doctor Fischer of Geneva is slighter than Greene’s other novels, but its pages contain several such characteristic touches. At one point, the narrator feels that “happiness is like one of those islands far out in the Pacific which has been reported by sailors when it emerges from the haze where no cartographer has ever marked it”. That’s a sentiment all the characters in Squid Game would agree with.