The End of the Affair

published	2004 by Vintage Books
binding	Paperback
isbn	0099478447 (isbn13: 9780099478447)
pages	192
description	Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision ...more [close] Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom--we were together in desire." Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for. "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive.... I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance.... People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You." Bendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalization. Writing to God in her journal, she says: <blockquote> You willed our separation, but he [Bendrix] willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You. </blockquote> It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible--perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. In her final years, Sarah's faith only deepens, even as she remains haunted by the bombing and the power of her own attraction to God. Set against the backdrop of a war-ravaged city, The End of the Affair is equally haunting as it lays forth the question of what constitutes love in troubling, unequivocal terms. --Melanie Rehak [close]
date added	01-05-07 edit book

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Kelly rated it:

03/22/08

bookshelves: brit-lit, favorites, fiction

Read in March, 2008

I am not only committing to the five stars for this review, I wish I could give it more. To say it deserves it would be rather an understatement. Reading the book was actually one of those physically memorable experiences: curling up in a ball with it, crouched over it reading behind piles of work I should have been doing, completely zoning out the world around me until it was forced to my attention, not to mention the actual physical pain I felt at the beauty of some of the language employed. G...more I am not only committing to the five stars for this review, I wish I could give it more. To say it deserves it would be rather an understatement. Reading the book was actually one of those physically memorable experiences: curling up in a ball with it, crouched over it reading behind piles of work I should have been doing, completely zoning out the world around me until it was forced to my attention, not to mention the actual physical pain I felt at the beauty of some of the language employed. Greene's writing here is just absolutely astounding. I cannot emphasize that enough. It is an obsessive love he writes of, obstensibly. That's what the back cover and the short summaries would have us believe that this book is about. But that is not all this book is about. Not even close.

Greene writes about hatred, the nature of belief, the nature of God and what it means to believe in Him, the physical and emotional experience of love, the effects that that love can have on our lives.... and blends it all together so that we see that none of those things can be seperated. This is one of three novels in his "Catholic" trilogy, and the love of and need for God is as intrinsic as the love and need for our soulmates in life. Everything in the end is about God, but through love and hate and the deepest emotions that can be written out from our core. Greene manages to convey emotions and ways of thinking about life and love that we have all felt, but in such a beautifully done way perhaps we could never quite express what it meant ourselves. There were phrases in the book that brought back vivid, intense flashes out of my own experiences, little poignant moments that exactly fit just some random little sentence inserted into a two page rant. That happened over and over again. If I did such things to my books, I would have paragraphs highlighted on every page.

Many times during the book a sort of stream of consciousness is evident in the narration where it is unclear whether the narrator is expressing his thoughts or those of his lover's, whether his thoughts are now or in the past, or whether he can really tell himself which it is. I found that device to be very powerful, showing the effect that even the memory of great events can have upon us, and how visceral the feelings can be even all these years later. Greene is also not afraid to lay his characters bare, perhaps get them on our bad side, to show them in all their ugliness and pettiness- which makes them all the more real. It is how we all act in love and in times of desperation and need. This was so much better done than Heart of the Matter, where I think Greene really tries to keep the reader at more of a distance. That was a mistake. /This/ is a book that gets one thinking about God and love and what it's all about. One has to get at the reader's core before such basic beliefs can really be brought out to be questioned and beaten. And the author won't do that without first going there himself through his characters and his deeply felt, naked writing.

Anyway... possibly the best treatise on love and God I've ever read, and certainly the one that will stay with me the longest. Those were just some random thoughts that came to me upon finishing it, but I hope it is enough that someone else will read it. It's an experience that everyone should have. ...less

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Pa rated it:

03/20/08

In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal and the outpouring of public outrage over it, I found myself return to re-read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, a half-autobiographical novel written in the first half of the 20th century about the intersection of love, adultery, and faith. No doubt at the time the novel was published --1951--adultery was somewhat a scandalous topic for many novelists. Greene's The End of the Affair, set against the backdrop of wartime London, tells the stor...more In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal and the outpouring of public outrage over it, I found myself return to re-read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, a half-autobiographical novel written in the first half of the 20th century about the intersection of love, adultery, and faith. No doubt at the time the novel was published --1951--adultery was somewhat a scandalous topic for many novelists. Greene's The End of the Affair, set against the backdrop of wartime London, tells the story of Sarah Miles, the beautiful wife of a stiff, boring English civil servant, who fell in love with Mauric Bendrix, a sardonic and cynical writer and ironically, through her affair found faith and love for God. One afternoon when Sarah and Maurice were having their secret tryst, a bomb exploded in Maurice's building and for a second Sarah thought Maurice was killed. Desperate, she prayed to God to make Maurice alive and in return she'll stop seeing him. Maurice, as it turned out, was not dead and Sarah abruptly ended the affair to fulfill her end of the bargain with God. The novel began when Maurice ran into Henry, Sarah's cuckold husband, who was tormented by suspicions that Sarah is having an affair. Jealous and ravenously curious, Maurice offered to help Henry spy on Sarah, going so far as hiring a private detective. Maurice discovered Sarah's true reason for ending the affair from reading her diary which was stolen from her by Maurice's private detective.

The End of the Affairs proves again that Greene is a master of the first arresting sentences. It begins like this: "A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." Greene chose to begin the story in the middle and throughout the novel flips back and forth between the present and the past. Sarah's journal constitutes an entire chapter, containing some of the best passages Greene has ever written, with compressed but illuminating sentences like: "I just want ordinary corrupt human love" or "I caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love." I cannot think of any other novel that depicts so effectively the ravening power of love as The End of the Affairs--with the exception of Wuthering Heights of course.

Adultery in Greene's world does not stand as a challenge to the social order and definitely not a sexual sin. Rather, it is a question of private guilt and individual conscience. Faith is a form of suffering as without it Sarah would not need to believe at all. This rings profoundly refreshing to me, especially when we’re dealing with a topic as complex as love (or adultery) between a man and a woman. In fact, Greene lovingly dedicates the novel to C, a short abbreviation for Catherine Watson, a beautiful American woman who was married to a British landowner, with whom Greene had a 10-year passionate affair. Much of the book is drawn from Greene's relationship with Catherine.

The Spitzer prostitute scandal is in no way comparable to the adultery described in Greene's novel especially given the legal implications of Spitzer's conduct, but in light of the overwhelming public display of outrage and moral condemnation of sexual and marital infidelity, I found comfort in Greene's complex but compassionate views toward these challenging issues.
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Martin rated it:

04/30/08

bookshelves: 2008books

Read in April, 2008

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is a fascinatingly internal little book, with strangely cinematic moments peeking through. (Perhaps I was biased because I read a copy of the book published to coincide with the 1999 Neil Jordan film adaptation so I might have been hyper-aware of those few sweeping, visual moments. (Though the opening description of two of the focal characters meeting on a rainy night is absolutely a filmic layup!)) It is a slight book, for sure -- my edition came up sho...more The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is a fascinatingly internal little book, with strangely cinematic moments peeking through. (Perhaps I was biased because I read a copy of the book published to coincide with the 1999 Neil Jordan film adaptation so I might have been hyper-aware of those few sweeping, visual moments. (Though the opening description of two of the focal characters meeting on a rainy night is absolutely a filmic layup!)) It is a slight book, for sure -- my edition came up short even of 200 pages -- but packs a lot of character and emotion into those scant 191 pages. It is essentially a character study of three people involved in a love triangle, while also serving as a tortured mediation on faith and the existence of God. If it sounds a bit weird, it is.

On the whole, I enjoyed the little novel, and was surprised (should I have been? it was first published in 1951...) at its sexual frankness. The writing is beautiful and incisive in its condensed descriptions of characters and situations. The smallest details are extremely telling, and Greene has a great eye for black comedy -- even sneaking in some post-WWII social satire. Yet bleakness prevails. It's an incisive and wonderfully-written book, but it's not any fun; unhappiness, misunderstanding, and and self-pity dog these characters at every turn. This isn't your classic conversion story, nor does anyone in the story really reach any sort of peace or understanding -- with each other OR the Almighty.

As a long novella or a shorter novel, everyone -- and everything -- in the book takes on a slightly poetic, condensed feel, more than symbol but slightly less that fully fleshed character. Much of the inner lives of the characters is left to mere allusion and suggestion -- effective in places and somewhat maddening in others. The woman in the center of this triangle gets the shortest shrift of all. We peek into her diary -- strangely, her narrative voice reads JUST like the narrative voice throughout the rest of the book...weird! -- but even that shortcut into her thoughts comes up short of offering any real explanation or understanding. Not a criticism, just a somewhat frustrated observation. Frankly, I found myself more interested in understanding the thoughts and emotions of the characters than with the mystical, religious (?), and enigmatic conclusion to the tale. It becomes clear the focus of the text is not so much to flesh out these characters as it is to wrestle with the ideas of God, spirituality, and organized religion -- the validity, existence, worth, etc, of the same. By the end of the book, part of me wished Greene had focused his impressive literary, linguistic, and observational skill just a bit less on their religious struggles and a bit more on their inner lives and motivations. But I guess that would make it a totally different book, huh?...less

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