The End of the Affair

If only today’s books were written like this. It is smart, thought provoking and has clean language even with an adult theme. Bravo! I can see why the author is considered one of the best from the 20th century.

The End of the Affair is the most autobiographical of Greene's major novels. In it, he exhumes the emotions of a fiery sexual passion, apparently based on his own affair with Catherine Walston, to whom he dedicates the novel. Greene converted to Catholicism as a young man, and he also uses this novel to illuminate the difficult path a seeker must take to arrive at belief in the Roman Catholic god.The plot is convoluted, and at times barely credible. The novelist Maurice Bendrix had a torrid affair with Sarah Miles, the wife of a dull civil servant, which Sarah broke off abruptly and without explanation. The novel opens a few years later, when Bendrix bumps into Sarah's husband, Henry. Henry, unaware of his wife's affair with Bendrix, confides that he's worried about Sarah's mysterious comings and goings, and is thinking of hiring a detective to follow her. Henry abandons the idea, but Bendrix is still consumed with jealousy and wants to know who has replaced him in Sarah's affections. He hires the detective on his own. Over the course of the investigation, Bendrix learns why Sarah left him, who Sarah is now seeing, and that he hasn't been displaced by another man after all. Bendrix must decide how to deal with what he's learned about Sarah, and what to do about his reawakened feelings for her.Greene spares us no instance of the anger, pettiness, and spitefulness of Bendrix' possessive love. Indeed, we see little that's life-enhancing in this affair, unless you count the fever of desire that hurls Bendrix out of the confines of his own consciousness or the brief spikes of bliss during snatched moments of sex. Bendrix discovers, as many have before him, that love and hate come from the same source; once he's fallen into the well of strong emotions, he has trouble figuring out how to swim back up to the light.Both Sarah and Bendrix are reaching for something transcendent. Bendrix believes he'll find it in the relationship with Sarah, if only they can love each other perfectly enough. Sarah comes to believe that what she's seeking lies beyond the flesh. The emotions unleashed by her physical love for Maurice enable her to apprehend the "aweful mystery" of divine love. She resists at first, then gives over to god. Bendrix is a harder case. He starts out dismissing even the idea of god as a childish legend. By the end of the book, he's having heated arguments with this god in whom he doesn't believe.Greene's justification for Sarah's turn towards religious faith seems to be that human love, compassion and agency are inadequate to the task of relieving human suffering. Once we reach the end of human resources, god is the only answer left. He's too good a novelist to get overly didactic, and too keen an intellect not to have doubts about the rigid, dour dogma of his adopted Catholicism. This interplay between doubt and faith gives The End of the Affair its tensile strength. That and his emotionally courageous depiction of passionate love allow this novel to transcend its post World War II milieu, and explain why it continues to snare successive generations of readers.

Last night I came home from work, picked up this novel and read it to the very last page. It left a deep feeling of profundity in the air, and after setting it aside, I lay pondering about the existence of God, the concept of Catholicism and the author himself, who had converted to this faith. It was therefore eerie this morning to come to the office and read in the papers that Graham Greene had died the day before. A coincidence that I should be reading one of his books on the very day, where at last, he was perhaps going to meet this very God he believed in. - (April 4, 1991)* * *There are authors and books that come back to some of us through the years, and the late Graham Greene is a visitor here at times. There was no particular reason, or so I thought at the time, when recently I decided to read again his "End of The Affair" (1951). The story ends, or begins in London after WWII and Maurice Bendrix, the narrator is a writer who is gaining prominence among his readership. His journal, which he calls an account of hate, begins after he runs into an acquaintance, Henry Miles whom he hasn't seen in two years on a bleak wet night in January, and they have drinks together at a neighboring pub.Henry Miles, now a rising civil servant at the Ministry of Home Security, does not know that Bendrix had an intense affair with his wife Sarah for a few years, and that she suddenly left Bendrix without an explanation after one of their passionate encounters. After surviving a bomb explosion at his lodgings, he writes later in his journal: "She got up from the floor and reached for her clothes. I told her there's no point in your leaving. There must be an All Clear first". But Sarah has just made a promise to someone and he does not realize that she is now saying farewell.Two years later, Bendrix is now full of hatred for her and for Henry, having always despised the latter, and yet against the force of his will, he is anxious to get as much news of Sarah as he can from the deceived husband, whom he considers an impotent, bland and dull man. So it comes as a rude surprise when Henry tells him sadly over drinks: 'Jealousy's an awful thing'; a stinging irony that Henry for the first time now suspects Sarah, who has had affairs since their marriage, of seeing another man. Henry is sufficiently distressed, and at the risk of his impeccable reputation, about to approach a detective agency.Bendrix, in a renewed state of bitterness and jealousy, calmly offers to act on his behalf as a caring friend, and shoulder this unsavory burden by approaching the agency, pretending to be a betrayed lover of Sarah's, and ask for an investigation of his newest rival.While some readers might find this somewhat farcical if devious, Greene, with his masterful writing skills, is able to set the tone for his famous novel and portrays Bendrix in such an unflattering way, that he sounds both detestable and despicable: a difficult, complex and selfish man at odds with himself, riddled with doubts and insecurity, and so full of hatred and resentment for his lost love, that one remains sober in the reading of this affair. While he is able to describe himself accurately in his notes, he shows no intent of really wishing to change, and this in itself might be cause for an opinion of his character in itself. When we read later of this self-portrayal in the novel, we also understand why he feels at times that there is a demon at work inside himself.Graham Greene, by many accounts, was irritated to be labeled as a Catholic author, instead as an author who was Catholic, and some of his readers have been irritated in turn by his religious views, becoming disapproving at times in the process. When it comes to such a personal and sensitive matter as religion, I read carefully what the cold distant Father Crompton in this story has to say when he comes to dinner with Henry and Bendrix; the latter who finally breaks down into a rage at the end and causes a furor of a scene. But the priest remains implacable, holding his hand out to Henry and turning his back on Bendrix, as he leaves.In the second reading of this novel, I decided instead to follow the persona of Sarah in her foot-steps, for she reminds me of someone close to my heart, and Sarah is a woman with a vast capacity for love, who may never be able to find it. She has been attempting to fill an emotional void from the time of her birth, which often leaves her feeling lost in the desert. Bendrix is the only man she has truly loved, and yet she has often hated him for his inability to understand her, his relentless hounding and jealous accusations, his cruel undermining and mockery of her behavior, while attempting in his insecurity, to destroy them both in a final act of fear: Fear of losing the only happiness he has known, rather than await what he perceives as the inevitable death of their love.As for Sarah's own character, her love for Bendrix, the promise she made two years ago to someone else, the struggle to come to terms with herself and the one she is learning to believe and love, we learn more of the above from her journal which Bendrix has managed to secure, and then later much more when Bendrix takes Sarah's lost vacuous mother to dinner, who relays to his shock, what might be termed as the very beginning of The Affair.It was of deep interest for this reader to learn with compassion of the expressions of love and care that the men of import in Sarah's life have to offer her, and it is perhaps the humble but ever loyal detective, Parkis, for whom I maintain at this age a soft-spot, because he is the first to understand that Sarah is 'Good' through her many kindnesses, her aura, tenderness and impact on others.This was Graham's last romantic novel, laced with religious and autobiographical undertones, where the Dead may be the ones praying for the Living. If the pivotal figure in his short masterpiece, Maurice Bendrix, a devastated man and tormented soul, is finally able to find some inner peace and solace, some of the believers among us may feel that only one has the answer when it comes to the resolution of this final matter.For S. Curteis who once asked 'When will we ever see each other again?', an answer could be that one can always love and believe without seeing. This much we both now know is true.

Published in 1951, this is set in London during, and shortly after, the years of the Second World War and draws autobiographically on his own love affair with Lady Catherine Walston, which began in 1947. This book is more a record of hate, than of love, our central character, Maurice Bendrix tells us. Indeed, Bendrix is full of hate and anger, jealousy and spite. The novel begins in 1946, when Bendrix, an author, runs into Henry Miles on Clapham Common. Bendrix was having an affair with Henry’s wife, Sarah; but she ended the affair, leaving Bendrix an embittered and obsessive lover.This is a novel which is so realistic, so full of pain and rage, that you almost want to turn away from the page. Indeed, Bendrix is very much an anti-hero, full of unlikeable traits. He loves Sarah and longs for her to call him, but, when she is with him, he immediately wants to start a row with her. He is selfish, unkind, hurtful and yet, what saves him as a character, is that he knows he is behaving badly. He is all too aware of how unfair he is and how desperately he loves Sarah. Henry Miles is an important, successful Civil Servant, who cares for Sarah, but the couple have long lost the romantic side of their marriage. However, Bendrix is unaware of the real reasons why Sarah left him and his attempt to discover the truth will lead to disaster.Although this sounds a very depressing and dark novel, it has some tragic-comic moments; most notably in the character of the private detective, Parvis, and ‘his boy,’ Lance. The novel also delves into some huge, and important themes; the destructiveness of jealousy, the strange, reciprocal relationship, that grows between Henry and Bendrix, religion, vows and success. Through it all, Graham Greene lays bare his characters, and, through them, himself, with painful clarity. You cannot read this and not be moved.

This is meant to be a love story but it is as much about love as a stick of celery. Yes, it opens well, and I was gripped in the first 50 pages wanting to know how the affair was going to end, but then we get her diary and it goes on and on and on about God and whether she loves God more than she loves him. Even when it gets back to our hero, the story-line is tedious and repetitive - their walks across the common and to and from the cinema or the restaurant or to visit the funny atheist, and pages of mental battles with God. We are given Parki (very unfortunate name) I presume to add some variety because it is not clear what he had to do with any of it once the detective work is called off. For me it he was just another tedious distraction. The most cold, clinical love story I've ever read.

The end of this affair, here between a rather bloodless moderately successful writer and a married woman, whose husband is an even more bloodless (less bloodful?) civil servant, as the V1s rain down over Clapham Common in WWII, is brought about by her guilt, her husband's inadequacy, and the writer's coldness. She tries to find her place with God, and she dies, with that unresolved.I found it beautiful, mesmerising, desperately sad, and profound, as well as wonderfully atmospheric of wartime London.

I read a good number of Graham Greene novels when I was an English student forty years ago, but not this one. I found it disappointing on a number of levels. The structure was very fluid and some parts were too long while others were lacking in substance.All of the characters were unsympathetic for most of the time. Only Henry Miles in the last tenth provoked any amount of sympathy. There was a meanness of spirit in the novel which I disliked and the love/hate theme was overplayed and overworked.The novel was full of description of feeling which was flogged whereas actual events which caused them or led to them were scarce and sketchy.I read it to the end, but it was a trudge.

What an intriguing book. Can a deal made in an instant hold such power over a person? I would imagine that two people, one of faith and one with none (although this is not possible) would find very different things in this book. I very much enjoyed the novelty of this book, so refreshing to leave thrillers and crime behind. Alas I did not leave romance behind, but this was different. I say jump in to this book and let it lead you where it will and leave you.... who knows where!