What I'm Reading: The End of the Affair

I was early for lunch with some friends so I began to read.  I read. I carry books with me like some sort of charm.  One never has to worry about being bored or lonely or lost if one has a good book. Or maybe it’s that one can forget being bored or lonely or lost when absorbed in a good book..  So, alone and early for lunch, I began to read.

Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in Penguin Books paperback edition with the author’s name and the title printed in black on the mint green spine, and a black and white photograph of sullen trees in a watery field on the cover. It’s a novel I return to every so often.

The arrival of my friends, sudden and loud, surprised me.

“What are you reading?” one asked me.  I told her the title and flipped the book over so she could read the publishers blurb on the back cover.

“The novelist Maurice Bendrix’s love affair with his friend’s wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz.  One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship.  It seemed impossible that there could be a rival for her heart.  Yet two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Parkis, a private detective, to follow Sarah and to find out the truth.”

“Interesting,” she said as she pushed the book back to me.

“It’s as close as I’ll ever come to reading a romance novel,” I said and she laughed.  And I regretted my jest. One shouldn’t be trite with sacred things, and The End of the Affair just might be a sacred thing.

The publisher’s description doesn’t really describe the story; it’s not a detective story. It’s not a mystery to be uncovered, but rather a mystery to be believed.

The End of the Affair is a love story, though it is contained in what the narrator describes as a “record of hate.” It is the story of a tragic love triangle with four lovers, awkward and impossible to reconcile. It is a story of faith and the struggle of faith, the struggle for faith. It is a story of love and suffering.  It is of saints who want to be sinners and sinners who, with only a small step, could become saints. 

It is also, in part, an autobiographical novel, based on Greene’s affair with Lady Catherine Walston.  The book is dedicated “To C.”

“It was the second time you had given him back:  the first time I had hated You for it and You’d taken my hate like You’d taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh – as I have sometimes laughed at Maurice, saying, ‘Do you remember how stupid we were…?’”

It’s been filmed twice, in 1955 and in 1999.  It was also been adapted into a chamber opera in 2004.