Book Review | ‘The End of the Affair’, by Graham Greene
By: Harry A. C. R.
Tags: Books, Catholic, Books And Authors, Book Review, Literature

Photo by Waqar on Unsplash

Graham Greene only wrote one novel in the first person. Fittingly, it’s the one that most faithfully reflects his own experience. The End of the Affair, released for the first time in 1951, is a thinly disguised account of Greene’s sexual relationship with a married woman named Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated: “To C.” Walston demanded that the real-life affair end after the release of the book that fictionalised its end. But she and Greene started up again and carried on for about another 15 years.

In The End of the Affair, the narrator is a rising writer called Maurice Bendrix. ‘A story has no beginning or end,’ he tells us. ‘Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ He describes his affair with Sarah Miles, a woman married to a civil servant who is dull and apparently uninterested in (if not uncapable of) sex. He differs from the narrator in that he likes to be comfortable. Bendrix prefers the opposite.

Bendrix proceeds to tell the story of how the relationship began and ended, but in a roundabout sort of way. His tale begins long after the affair is over when, by chance, he comes across Henry Miles while walking in south London. After a drink in a nearby pub, they go to Henry’s house, where Henry confides in Bendrix that he suspects his wife is sleeping with someone else. He has thought about hiring a private investigator to find out if his suspicion is true, but hasn’t yet found the courage to go through with it.

Henry has, however, prepared a letter, which sits unopened in his living room. Such is his trust in his wife that he’s sure she won’t open it. Bendrix offers to take the letter and contact the private investigator on Henry’s behalf. And so Bendrix finds himself in the strange position of trying to work out if the woman with whom he had an affair is having another, only with someone else.

The investigator, Mr. Parkis, gets going, and Bendrix finds himself reflecting on his own affair with Sarah. Here the events of the present begin to tangle themselves up with Bendrix’s reminscences. He remembers how he came to meet Sarah in 1939. He recalls how he wanted to talk to her about Henry because he was writing a book about a civil servant. He remembers Rules, where they often went for lunch, how they watched a film based on one of Bendrix’s books. And he remembers they had had sex, awkwardly, for the first time. He also recalls how his jealousy caused arguments and threatened to derail the relationship.

Reading The End of the Affair is a bit like reading an account of madness. But then this kind of love is a sort of madness if allowed to run riot. Bendrix’s affair with Sarah disrupts the productive rhythm of his working life as well as his emotions, which mutate into jealousy and hatred. Of course we’re told by Bendrix that he ‘prefers discomfort’; but a preference for complexity and inconvenience can’t justify the mess he makes for himself. And we should doubt the validity of any first-person narration, especially in this context. Bendrix may simply wish to set himself against the insipid Henry, or to convince himself and us that he enjoyed the instability of his relationship with Sarah.

But what Greene shows so well, and it’s the skill of the great novelist, is how there are a nearly infinite number of ways to view any one situation. To a point we are all unreliable narrators. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie wonders if you would have to ‘pity the stars’ if given ‘all the facts’, which points to the way perspective changes with knowledge. In The End of the Affair, Sarah’s diary entries paint a picture of her relationship with Bendrix that differs starkly from the one generated by his account.

It’s worth noting in spite of what he says at the beginning that Bendrix starts to question his ability to control the story, and even suspects at times that the story may be revealing itself to him as he attempts to tell it. He begins his account by saying that what is to follow is a ‘record of hate’; but he challenges this belief directly part-way through, which suggests that by telling the story Bendrix is working through his emotions. His love may be just ‘as deficient’ as his hate, he says. And love, as Greene shows through the mutation of Bendrix’s emotions, easily becomes hate, and vice versa.

This being Greene, the novel is shot through with allusions to the divine and with Catholic themes in particular. Bendrix ascribes his hatred and selfishness to a ‘demon’ which points to the absence of God in his life. It invokes the Augustinian idea that evil exists in the mere absence of God, the role of whom grows as the story unfolds. And in the end, good in the everyday, earthly sense is not set against evil, but belief against unbelief — belief and the grace to which it may lead always carrying with it the possibility of redemption for the believer.

This is a novel of shades of grey, out of which no one comes looking especially admirable. It’s a study of the psychology of the lover, of contradiction, within the human mind and the Catholic mind: we suspect Greene, like Bendrix, is working something out as he writes. The effect is very powerful, and the ending hints at a resolution that may explain why Greene did not write any more novels after The End of the Affair with such overtly Catholic themes.