The End of the Affair - Softcover

Grenee, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140287361 ISBN 13: 9780140287363

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

The tortured love affair between novelist Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, the wife of a civil servant, reaches its height during the Blitz. Then, without any explanation, Sarah breaks off the relationship. Two years later, his jealousy and grief reawakened by a chance encounter, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah. As his love turns into obsession, Bendrix begins to question everything he has ever believed in. The End of the Affair is perhaps Greene's most personal and intense novel.

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:

"A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy."--"New York Times" "Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within."--Norman Sherry, "Independent" "From the Trade Paperback edition."

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140287361
• ISBN 13: 9780140287363
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192