Published 1951 / Length 192 pages
In post-Second World War England, novelist Maurice Bendrix is determined to discover why his ex-lover, Sarah Miles, broke off their relationship suddenly and without explanation two years previously. When the pair are briefly reunited, Maurice’s old feelings resurface and he hires a private detective to follow Sarah in order to find out why and, more specifically, for whom she left him. However, his reignited passion soon turns into a destructive fixation. The End of the Affair is a masterful novel exploring the fine lines between love and hate, possession and loss, religious faith and human despair. It is the first of Greene’s novels to present an interventionist God directly touching people’s lives and performing miracles. The novel scrutinizes physical and spiritual love and the intersection between the two – a subject that is explored through the Catholic belief in the incarnated Christ. While examining the raptures of physical love, The End of the Affair looks beyond the transience of sexual desire to consider the eternal nature of the soul and the antagonism between flesh and spirit.
‘I like Greene’s clipped style; he doesn’t need flashy literary devices to convey his meaning. Beautifully written and a probing examination of human relationships, this is definitely one of my favourite books.’ – KIERAN, 23
• One of the most important devices Greene employs – crucial to the plot, tone and perspective of the novel – is the switch in narrator and narrative form halfway through the novel. What do you think is the purpose and effect of this transition?
• What motifs and devices does Greene utilize in order to explore the relationship between the physical and the spiritual? Do you think bodily and spiritual love are ultimately presented as reconcilable or conflicting forces?
• The novel’s epigraph is a quotation from the French Catholic novelist Léon Bloy: ‘Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.’ What do you think is the role of suffering and its effect on personal development in the novel?
• The novel was based on Greene’s own affair with Lady Catherine Walston, for whom he left his wife in 1948.
• Critics consider The End of the Affair to be the last of Greene’s Catholic tetralogy, consisting of Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948).
• The Heart of the Matter by GRAHAM GREENE – a long-serving police officer in a British colonial town on the west coast of Africa wrestles with the sin of pride during the First World War.
• Brideshead Revisited by EVELYN WAUGH (see here) – a similar analysis of the ways in which adultery and faith can struggle to coexist.
• Madame Bovary by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT – an examination of adultery and its psychological effects in nineteenth-century France.