The End of the Affair

I remember reading this in my student bedsit and being transfixed. I was studying art but had just decided that I wanted to be a novelist. As such, I loved the opening lines: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

It is a simple yet beautiful book about love, belief, and betrayal. I’m not religious, but the testing of someone’s faith and how it may make them act stuck with me. Also, the facade of the ‘stiff upper lip,’ but underneath, the… show more.

I love this brilliantly constructed story of love in the time of war by one of the masters of the English language. Drawn, as was much of Greene’s literary output, from his own personal experiences, the affair in question is between up-and-coming writer Maurice Bendrix and civil servant’s wife, Sarah Miles.

A story of passion, guilt, and betrayal as Nazi bombs rain down on London. A very great wartime novel. 

Graham Greene is another one of my favorites, and to me, this is his best and most heartbreaking novel. Greene traveled widely and wrote novels that were closely reported, but this book required no research, which may account for its raw, intimate quality.

His novelist-narrator, Maurice Bendrix, is a thinly disguised stand-in for Greene, and the story of a wartime affair unraveling among spiritual mysteries closely tracks Greene’s own life, both romantic and spiritual—a fact that would have been well known to contemporary readers, as the affair that inspired the book was widely gossiped about.

Set during the London Blitz, I found this to be Greene’s most vivid novel.

His characters reel in the face of the power of Hitler’s onslaught on London, yet cling to the possibilities of love, even through the carnage and loss, until the wreckage of London overtakes them in a beautiful and tragic conclusion.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. The End of the Affair has every I want in a novel: suspense, romance, an examination of life, death, and faith, and brilliant writing throughout. There are bombs dropping on London and yet this somehow remains in the background while the biggest battles are fought by the human spirit. Even in the midst of war, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, humans take care of their families, feed themselves, work, and make love. When looking back on a life, sometimes it's those small moments that emerge as our most cherished and miraculous.

I have read this book several times, and always find more in it. Maurice Bendrix looks back on his four-year passionate affair with married Sarah Miles. But when she drops him, after a near-miss with an exploding bomb, his obsession turns to hate, and he agonises over what went wrong. Set in 1940s South London, in the Blitz, this is one of Greene’s Catholic novels and there are many one-sided conversations with God, as Bendrix questions his own behaviour, who Sarah really is, and the meaning of love and its place in the world. It is set in a part… show more.

The Blitz provides a background and a context for this story of an illicit affair. It makes us feel what it would be like to live in a situation where death and destruction are dealt out every day in a random dispensation from enemy bombers, and people can never be certain they will survive into the next day. This novel brings an element of religious faith into this situation, and the characters battle with their moral dilemmas and unanswered questions as much as the V1’s that rain down from the sky.

A dark, brooding novel of betrayal, in my memory, it’s all set in shadows – dark streets and badly lit rooms. One man has an affair with another man’s wife, ultimately causing grief for all. The south London setting is so well done, as is the evocation of wartime austerity and infidelity. To me, this is a novel that is largely about atmosphere. Once read, it haunts you forever.

For anyone who’s had their lives rocked by a clandestine affair or has profoundly fallen in love knowing it will be fatal, this book will hit your heart. A narrative set against the bleakness of post-war bombed-out London, I love the way Greene blends the physical metaphor of this world with his own internal struggles around faith, infidelity, and obsessive love for a self-destructive woman. It showed me that it was okay to love and lose and how one can craft great literature from pain. But more than that, I think it taught me that the passing of time is… show more.