Spoiler warning.
The End of the Affair is fantastic. I was pretty disappointed when I was introduced to Graham Greene’s work through Brighton Rock earlier this year, but this was an entirely different experience. In fewer than two hundred pages, Greene delivers a highly emotional and intimate exploration of love and hate. The End of the Affair chronicles the titular romantic affair (and the aftermath) that takes place between the main protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, and Sarah Miles.
As the novel progresses, Greene gradually unpacks not only the relationship between Bendrix and Sarah, but also the inner anxiety and turmoil each faces in their search for fulfillment. Bendrix, a writer and womanizer, spends much of the novel’s first half behaving as though spying on Sarah, sabotaging her when he believes she has moved on to affairs with other men, and proving his superiority to Sarah’s boring civil servant husband, Henry, will bring him fulfillment. Ironically, he gets so wrapped up in his misconceptions about Sarah that it takes reading her private diary to illustrate to him both her sincere love and her inner turmoil. Once the narrative shifts to Bendrix reading these diary entries, The End of the Affair becomes truly spectacular. Sarah’s letters serve both as confessions of her love for Bendrix and as explanations for why their affair ended two years prior, in 1944. To Bendrix’s surprise and confusion, Sarah believes that she is bound to honor a promise she made to God to end her affair, honor her marriage, and keep away from Bendrix in exchange for God having saved Bendrix from a bombing raid during the War. While this transaction fills Bendrix with resentment and reaffirms his scorn for religion, it awakens in Sarah a long-dormant interest in Catholicism. While Bendrix blames God for destroying his love, Sarah welcomes the opportunity to suffer like Christ if it means her lover can be saved. Greene’s exploration of suffering and different characters’ responses to it becomes even more intense following Sarah’s untimely death.
As much as this is a romance novel, it really shines as an exploration of how different people can experience the same events and relationships and come away from them with entirely different outlooks. From a spiritual point-of-view, I found Greene’s approach of having Sarah come into her faith through non-Church actors unusual and relatable. Arguably, it is her interactions with the atheist speaker, Richard, that bring her closer to God. As Sarah tells him, “You’ve always said the priests taught you to disbelieve. Well, it can work the other way too.” By contrast, the tragic events of the novel only serve to push Bendrix further down a path more full of hate than love. He never recovers from the end of his affair with Sarah and he blames God for taking her from him. And yet, he is able to carry on in life by developing a close friendship with Henry and continuing his career; almost as though Sarah’s love, like God’s, transcends death.
The End of the Affair convinced me that Graham Greene deserves his accolades as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, a celebrated Catholic novelist, and an essential author of post-war Britain.
“Let me forget me. Dear God, I’ve tried to love and I’ve made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I’d know how to love them. I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don’t mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.”
