The End of the Affair

✍ Scribed by Graham Greene

• Publisher: Random House;Vintage Digital
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 127 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1407086804

✦ Synopsis

Graham Greenes masterful novel of love and betrayal in World War II London is undeniably a major work of art (The New Yorker).

Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, develops an acquaintance with Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant named Henry. Maurice claims its to divine a character for his novel-in-progress. Thats the first deception. What he really wants is Sarah, and what Sarah needs is a man with passion. So begins a series of reckless trysts doomed by Maurices increasing romantic demands and Sarahs tortured sense of guilt. Then, after Maurice miraculously survives a bombing, Sarah ends the affairquickly, absolutely, and without explanation. Its only when Maurice crosses paths with Sarahs husband that he discovers the fallout of their duplicityand its more unexpected than Maurice, Henry, or Sarah herself could have imagined.

Adapted for film in both 1956 and 1999, Greenes novel of all that inspires loveand all that poisons itis singularly moving and beautiful (Evelyn Waugh).

**

Amazon.com Review

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:

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.

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

Review

"Devastating study of the collision of different kinds of faith, betrayal and commitment" The Times "In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety" -- William Golding "One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language" -- William Faulkner "Greene's novel of illicit love captures perfectly the atmosphere of rainy wartime London - try to read this in one sitting if you can." Express "This novel had a great effect on my life...This is not a sentimental book, or one full of the kindness of God, in that both the man and the woman suffer the pain of loss and feel the heat of hell. This novel persuaded me to become a Catholic." Guardian