The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

Maurice Bendrix is one of the angriest narrators I’ve encountered. He’s angry at his dead lover, Sarah Miles, for abandoning him.  He’s angry at her husband for his passive acceptance of their infidelity, even for taking him into his home as a flat mate after her death.  His anger renders all his judgments suspect.  In the end, he finds that he has misjudged and misunderstood Sarah.  He misrepresents her religious inclinations to the priest who wants to give her a Catholic burial.  As an agnostic, even an atheist, he resists to the end acknowledging that she had become a believer seeking to connect or reconnect with the Catholic church.

Despite his anger and his meanness, Bendrix is a powerful narrator.

The End of the Affair (1961) is a religious novel masquerading as a story about an adulterous affair.  For its time, it’s fairly graphic about the details.  The novel takes place during the Second World War.  While Sarah is with Bendrix in his flat, a V-1 bomb strikes the house.  She finds him under a fallen door and assumes he is dead.  She prays to God, whom she half believes in, to let him live.  The next moment he appears, covered with dust and alive. In her prayer she promised God that if he allows Bendrix to live, she would leave him because it would mean that God is real and that their affair is a sin.  She abides by her promise and returns to her husband.

The crisis of faith is first of all Sarah’s. Her lover’s survival of the bombing brings her to believe. But it is also that of Bendrix, who can’t accept Sarah’s conversion and who resists to the end acknowledging it or its possible meaning for him.  He becomes all the angrier when he reads her journal and discovers why she left him and that she still loved him. He is angriest of all, ironically, at the God in whom he doesn’t believe.

The End of the Affair was an intense, powerful novel.  Bendrix himself is a novelist.  A little research revealed that Greene drew for this novel from an affair he had with the woman to whom it is dedicated. He significantly changed some details.

My previous encounters with Greene were with The Power and the Glory (1940), which I barely remember, and The Comedians (1966), which did not impress me, though I read it at an age when I could hardly have appreciated it.  The End of the Affair convinces me to reread The Power and the Glory again and to read other novels by Greene.