The End of the Affair
Graham Greene, 1951
Penguin Group USA
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142437988
Summary
The novel focuses on Maurice Bendrix, a rising writer during World War II in London, and Sarah Miles, the wife of an impotent civil servant.
Bendrix and Sarah fall in love quickly, but he soon realizes that the affair will end as quickly as it began. The relationship suffers from his overt and admitted jealousy. He is frustrated by her refusal to divorce Henry, her amiable but boring husband. When a bomb blasts Bendrix's flat as he is with Sarah, he is nearly killed. After this, Sarah breaks off the affair with no apparent explanation.
Later, Bendrix is still wracked with jealousy when he sees Henry crossing the Common that separates their flats. Henry has finally started to suspect something, and Bendrix decides to go to a private detective to discover Sarah's new lover. Through her diary, he learns that, when she thought he was dead after the bombing, she made a promise to God not to see Bendrix again if he allowed him to live again. Greene describes Sarah's struggles. After her sudden death from a lung infection bought to a climax by walking on the Common in the rain, several miraculous events occur, advocating for some kind of meaningfulness to Sarah's faith. By the last page of the novel, Bendrix may have come to believe in a God as well, though not to love him. (From Wikipedia.)
The End of the Affair is the fourth and final explicitly Catholic novel by Greene. The others are Brighton Rock (1938) The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948).
The novel has been adapted twice to film: in 1955, with Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr, and in 1999, with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.
Author Bio
• Birth—October 2, 1904
• Where—Berkhamstd, England, UK
• Death—April 3, 1991
• Where—Vevey, Switzerland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Hawthornden Prize; Companion
of Honour; Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour; Order of Merit.
Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works—he called them "entertainments," to distinguish them from his novels—even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe. "Greeneland" is a place of seedy bars and strained loyalties, of moral dissolution and physical decay.
Greene spent his university years at Oxford "drunk and debt-ridden," and claimed to have played Russian roulette as an antidote to boredom. At age 21 he converted to Roman Catholicism, later saying, "I had to find a religion...to measure my evil against." His first published novel, The Man Within, did well enough to earn him an advance from his publishers, but though Greene quit his job as a London Times subeditor to write full-time, his next two novels were unsuccessful. Finally, pressed for money, he set out to write a work of popular fiction. Stamboul Train (also published as The Orient Express) was the first of many commercial successes.
Throughout the 1930s, Greene wrote novels, reviewed books and movies for the Spectator, and traveled through eastern Europe, Liberia, and Mexico. One of his best-known works, Brighton Rock, was published during this time; The Power and the Glory, generally considered Greene's masterpiece, appeared in 1940. Along with The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, they cemented Greene's reputation as a serious novelist—though George Orwell complained about Greene's idea "that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only."
During World War II, Greene was stationed in Sierra Leone, where he worked in an intelligence capacity for the British Foreign Office under Kim Philby, who later defected to the Soviet Union. After the war, Greene continued to write stories, plays, and novels, including The Quiet American, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, and The Captain and the Enemy. For a time, he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, producing both original screenplays and scripts adapted from his fiction.
He also continued to travel, reporting from Vietnam, Haiti, and Panama, among other places, and he became a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Some biographers have suggested that his friendships with Communist leaders were a ploy, and that he was secretly gathering intelligence for the British government. The more common view is that Greene's leftist leanings were part of his lifelong sympathy with the world's underdogs—what John Updike called his "will to compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class."
But if Greene's politics were sometimes difficult to decipher, his stature as a novelist has seldom been in doubt, in spite of the light fiction he produced. Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and R. K. Narayan paid tribute to his work, and William Golding prophesied: "He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
Extras
• Greene's philandering ways were legendary; he frequently visited prostitutes and had several mistresses, including Catherine Walston, who converted to Catholicism after reading The Power and the Glory and wrote to Greene asking him to be her godfather. After a brief period of correspondence, the two met, and their relationship inspired Greene's novel The End of the Affair.
• Greene was a film critic, screenwriter, and avid moviegoer, and critics have sometimes praised the cinematic quality of his style. His most famous screenplay was The Third Man, which he cowrote with director Carol Reed. Recently, new film adaptations have been made of Greene's novels The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Greene's work has also formed the basis for an opera: Our Man in Havana, composed by Malcolm Williamson. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Undeniably a major work of art...It remains from first to last an almost faultless display of craftsmanship and a wonderfully assured statement of ideas.
The New Yorker
An absorbing piece of work, passionately felt and strikingly written.
Atlantic Monthly
Singularly moving and beautiful...the relationship of lover to husband with its crazy mutation of pity, hate, comradeship, jealousy, and contempt is superbly described...the heroine is consistently lovable.
Evelyn Waugh
Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair...all have claims to greatness; they are as intense and penetrating and disturbing as an inquisitor's gaze.
John Updike
Graham Greene was in class by himself.... He will be read and remembered as the ultimate twentieth-century chronicler of consciousness and anxiety.
William Golding
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The End of the Affair:
1. Graham Greene tells his story through flashbacks. Why might he have used this plot technique? What does it lend to the story that otherwise might not be achieved through a straightforward timeline?
2. How would you describe Maurice Bendrix? Is he a sympathetic character? What about Sarah Miles? How would you describe her character? Is she sympathetic?
3. Why do the two fall in love? What is the nature of their affair? Is it sexual passion...is it simply wanting something forbidden or unattainable? Or is their relationship based on something more? What is each searching for?
4. Author Graham Greene plums the nature of human love in this novel. How does he present its complexities and its contradictions? How is it possible to both love and hate someone at the same time? Why are we willing to hurt those we love?
5. Follow-up to Question #4: In what way is Greene suggesting that human love mirrors divine love in this novel? How are the two connected?
6. Sarah makes a bargain with God, a God she's not sure she actually believes in. Why then does she continue to hold to her bargain if she is so skeptical? Did your feelings change toward Sarah when you understood her reasons for breaking off the affair? Or do you find her bargain admirable...or shallow and self-serving?
7. What happens to Sarah as she listens to atheist Richard Smythe denounce religion on the common and when he lectures her on the falsity of religious doctrines? Why do his atheistic arguments, which she tries to accept, have the opposite effect on her? What is at work? Is it simply reverse psychology? Or something else? What makes Sarah come to think of Richard as a believer—rather than the atheist he professes to be?
8. What is the spiritual journey that Sarah ultimately makes as she reaches the close of her life?
9. Talk about the arguments Bendix has with God toward the end of the novel. How does he move from disbelief to belief? How would you desdribe the nature of his faith...has he reached a final acceptance of God?
10. What, does Graham seem to be saying in this novel about the need for divine love? Why isn't human love adequate for our needs?
11. What feelings did you experience at the end of the novel?
12. Has reading this book in any way altered—or affirmed—your own beliefs? Has the book enlightened you...or not particularly?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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