The End Of The Affair (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Greene, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009928605X ISBN 13: 9780099286059

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

The love affair between Maurice Bendix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

About this title

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 rationalisation. 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:

"Singularly beautiful and moving" (Evelyn Waugh)

"One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language" (William Faulkner)

"In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety" (William Golding)

"Devastating study of the collision of different kinds of faith, betrayal and commitment" (The Times)

"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" (Beryl Bainbridge Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 009928605X
• ISBN 13: 9780099286059
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192