The End of the Affair

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.