The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It's all human nature, sir, isn't it?” "I would have liked to have left that past time alone, for as I write of 1939 I feel all my hatred returning. Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?" Maurice Bendrix is a moderately successful novelist--films are made from his books, and he is "praised for his technical ability"--but he earns little money from his writing and calls himself a scribbler. Beginning his account of an affair he had with Sarah Miles during WWII, he says, "this is a record of hate far more than of love." He then recounts recently seeing Sarah's civil-servant husband Henry at night standing in the rain without an umbrella and, instead of passing by unseen, addressing him. Had God or the devil moved him? He had had no contact with the couple ever since the affair ended over a year and a half ago, and he was unsure whom he hated more, Sarah or Henry, who'd remained obtusely innocent of the affair. On that rainy night, Henry ended up inviting Maurice home because he wanted to confide in him: suspecting Sarah of having an affair, he'd contacted a detective agency to investigate her but would like Maurice to laugh at him for being a fool so he can burn the agency's letter and forget his suspicions. "Then the demon spoke," however, and Maurice offered to visit the detective for Henry, initiating a tragic chain of events. As Maurice tells us, "How twisted we humans are. . ." (Maurice makes plenty of similarly bleak comments, like “Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent?”) It's not easy for Maurice to revisit the past: “If this book of mine fails to take a straight course it is because I am lost in a strange region." Throughout his account (his confession!), Maurice's honesty about the affair, about his self-centered love, jealousy, and hatred, and about his dislike of God, is so appalling that reading Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair (1951) felt like watching a man flay himself in public. It also made me wonder how much of it is autobiographical (apparently Greene based the character of Sarah on the woman with whom he had an affair and to whom he dedicated his novel). If it sounds unpleasant, it is, but it is also brilliant and funny and moving. The brilliance shines in philosophical and psychological insights (e.g., "The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than happiness"). The humor lies in witty lines (e.g., "He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road") and ironic situations (e.g., detective Parkis having named his son Lance because he believed that Sir Lancelot found the Holy Grail when actually he found Guinevere's bed). The emotional impact comes from the pain and suffering of the characters (e.g., Maurice strangling his and Sarah's affair before it can end naturally), and their gestures of humanity (e.g., Maurice putting a pair of biscuits by Henry's bed). Greene's characters feel real, especially Sarah, Henry, and Maurice, but also supporting ones like the sad-eyed detective Parkis and the desperate rationalist Smythe, and thus the relationships between them are absorbing. The third of the five books of the novel consists almost completely of Sarah's diary, and reading her naked words feels like an invasion of privacy of a real person and casts an intensely ironic light on the incidents that Maurice relates in the first two books. Colin Firth reads the audiobook superbly. He does not over-dramatize or showily alter his voice when speaking for different characters. Instead, he reads every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph with perfect understanding of the English language, the author's style, the mood and meaning of each scene, and the mind and emotion of each character. He enhances the novel. WWII plays a big part in the affair, and Greene concisely evokes what life was like in London then (e.g., "Once in the blitz I saw a man laughing outside his house where his wife and child were buried."), but the novel is most deeply about time (or eternity), love (or jealousy and hate and forgiveness), God (or devils), faith (or unbelief), miracles (or coincidences), reality (or magic), writing (or writing block), truth (or fiction), and memory (or misperception). I suppose that Greene finally stacks the deck against atheism a bit too neatly. But the suffering of the main characters is all so human and real that I am willing to give them whatever comfort they can find, and in Maurice's case his argument with God gives him little comfort. Even amidst his self-absorption, however, Maurice reveals a path to salvation, regardless of whether or not one believes in God, when he says, “I had become nearly human enough to think of another person's trouble.” View all my reviews
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