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Summary: Moving, Haunting Story of a Unique Love *Quadrilateral*
Review: God - particularly in his Roman Catholic emanation - is never far offstage in "Greeneland", as critics have dubbed the fictional landscape of Graham Greene, England's greatest novelist of the 20th century. (It is a disgrace he never won the Nobel Prize for Literature.)Thus we have in this story set against the background of London during World War II not just your normal love triangle - hapless husband, frustrated wife, passionate lover - but also a fourth player to complete the love *quadrilateral* - God, the other apparent "suitor" of the wife. In other words, we have in this book a traditional love triangle inside a most untraditional love quadrilateral. In assessing the book we should ask how well the author has evoked both of these character configurations. The love triangle is utterly convincing - indeed, the passions and practices of the lovers (he is a writer) strongly suggest a foundational event not in literature but in life. As for the love quadrilateral - the reader in Greeneland must acclimate himself or herself to this environment, fused as it is with Catholicism. Some will welcome it, others will be put off by it. Personally I think Greene pulls it off brilliantly. He makes the reader care - deeply - about the religious questions (not answers) which are at the core of the story. This is no mean feat; it would be so easy to be preachy and sententious. Greene, however, is neither of these; his sense of religion's role (if any) in human life is rooted in a deep and forgiving compassion for the sinner and his or her ways. A final word about the new movie version of this book - it is faithful to the story until near the end when the movie adds invented material concerning a post-affair affair. However in the end it returns to the material of the book. If you have not seen the movie, read the book first. And when the story evokes that love quadrilateral on top of what seemed to be a semple love triangle, take out your roadmaps: you are in Greeneland now.
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Summary: Hate never sounded so good
Review: It takes an extraordinary work of fiction to move me to such extremes as to read it more than once. This novel is a rare jewel containing prose so HONEST and agonizingly beautiful that my heart just aches with emotion the whole voyage through.
It's written in first person (which I adore) by a tortured character named Bendrix, who, after an ardent love affair with Sarah-a married woman, seeks out two years later to learn why she so unexpectedly ended it. What he doesn't know is that her reasons were entirely selfless and undesired since it was, in fact, a pact with God which forced her to leave him. "I tempted Fate and Fate accepted" she writes in her diary, which Bendrix later discovers and all his questions are then answered--with a price of course.
Set during WWII London, this powerful and poignant story gives us two lovers who are so consumed by their passion for one another, they are willing to destroy themselves and defy destiny for as long as they can. After all, what good is a life without love? At one point Sarah convinces herself that "Love doesn't end just because we don't see each other" but eventually realizes that isn't enough and for that 'greed' they are then doomed anyway.
Read this for an intense emotional impact, for a hope of understanding a higher power, or just to revel in a writing that makes obsession and jealousy so darkly delicious.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful story
Review: This is a great book. It is a powerful story that deals with love between a married woman named Sarah and a writter named Maurice who start out as friends then become lovers.The affair ends suddenly, and Maurice doesn't know why. When he sees her again after two years he becomes obssesed with Jeolousy and a strong desire to be with her again. He hires a detective to follow Sarah because he believes she is having an affair with another man. Graham Greene does a great job of describeing Sarahs anguish as she goes through a crisis of conscience and a search for God, and the selfeshness of Maurice who only cares for himself. This is a story of love under difficult circumstances.
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Summary: The Saddest Story?
Review: Greene was inspired by Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece of 1915, The Good Soldier, when he wrote The End of the Affair in 1951. Ford called his 'the saddest story', and indeed, Greene's work is nearly as sad. The love-story between Bendrix and Sarah is told in weaving, unchronological prose, moving from past to future, rarely staying in the present. As Bendrix loses Sarah, in the end, not to husband Henry, but to God, Bendrix's bitterness is firmly compounded, and the sadness of this story is not just the death of a lover, but the death of Bendrix's hope. There are hints at the end of the novel that Bendrix, who finally acknowledges God in his very hatred of Him, will come to share the faith that made Sarah's last days of life make some sense. But this is questionable. I strongly recommend this book to readers who likes Greene's detective fiction and his entertainments, but who crave a thinner book with a thicker theme. It should be noted that the novel should be taken more seriously than the recent film made of the book, directed by Neil Jordan. While Jordan's film was beautiful to watch, and the acting superb, the story was altered almost unrecognisably towards the end, and the assumption on the part of Jordan that the book was really about Greene and his mistress (Catherine Walston), coloured the film and destroyed much of its authenticity. Like all of Greene's works, this novel is largely problematic in theological terms, but as Greene works with paradoxes and rarely in terms of black and white, this is what we have come to expect, and love.
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Summary: Writing that moves your heart and mind
Review: More than any Graham Greene novels I have read, The End of the Affair successfully combines a tale of passionate and adulterous love with religious issues. These are difficult themes and in the brilliant hands of Mr Greene, we have an intelligent and sensitive novel that is beautifully written. Greene creates a small cast of characters who are trapped in their own desires - Bendrix's love for Sarah, a source of joy and hurt, hope and disappointment, and ultimately despair ; her search for rationality in the consequences of her own faith and the sad fate that has befallen her; and Henry's ideal of a solid marriage as a foundation of his ambitious career, a love perhaps but one devoid of passion and sharing. As always, Greene writes with economy of description - succint and precise yet almost perfect in conveying every scene, thought and feeling. The novel provides no answers nor does it contain any obvious message but the intelligent treatment of the various subjects and the wonderful writing makes this another literary gem by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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Summary: Hating or Loving Sarah--and God
Review: Greene's introspective novel relates the personal anguish and the interplay among the characters in an intensely romantic triangle. Set in postwar London this story chronicles the desperate love affair between Maurice Bendrix--a jealous novelist--and Sarah Miles, the wife of a mild-manned civil servant. Readers must judge if she is faithful to her lover or too free with her body and her heart, for such painful issues torment the protagonist. Unfolding in greater intimacy through
the use of the first person, THE END OF THE AFFAIR is not written in strict chronological order. We bounce between the present and war-torn London, with little literary help as to the time frame. The author even presents one scene from the perspective of both characters. Also several chapters consist of diary entries, which serve to clarify--or further confuse--the past for the tormented novelist. Bendrix is somewhat passive, though he can be goaded into action, especially when it comes to playing the sleuth about Sarah's latest affair. It is naive, trusting Henry, however, who seems content to suffer in silence. Through curious twists of fate the two men--once rivals--bond over Sarah against the true common enemy: God. While not overtly religious this novel reflects a strong undercurrent of the Man versus God conflict. What did Sarah really want in the end? How best can her adoring men respect her wishes? After having made a desperate vow to God to spare Maurice's life, Sarah is torn between resentment
of God (for denying her feminine fulfillment in the desert of her life), and a secret desire for spiritual intimacy with her creator. Can a childhood baptism into Catholicism suddenly "take" decades later? Why was she seeing both a priest and an atheist on the sly? How long can Bendrix maintin his disgust for the greatest passion of his life, whom he has never gotten over? The battle for Sarah's heart is pursued vehemently
by the two former rivals--who are adamant about what they consider best for her. Is this a novel about revenge or religious vindication, with its love-hate motif, inextricably interwoven between illicit courtship and foiled schemes? Just what are the limits of our responsibility to those whom we profess to love until death? This modern classic proves a captivating, thought-provoking read.
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Summary: Down the Labyrinthine Ways
Review: "I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter". (Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven) On a damp January evening in 1946, Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, meets an old friend, Henry Miles, a senior civil servant, on Clapham Common. Miles confides to Bendrix that he suspects his attractive young wife, Sarah, of having an affair, and that he has considered having her watched by a private detective. Miles is unaware that Bendrix himself was Sarah's lover for several years, although she broke off the affair without explanation in 1944. Bendrix, who has been tortured by jealousy ever since Sarah ended their affair, and who suspects her of having abandoned him for another lover, instructs a private detective himself to watch her and to obtain her diary. From this he discovers that the truth is stranger than he had thought. During a bombing raid, Bendrix was knocked unconscious when his house was struck by a V1 flying bomb. Believing him to be dead or fatally injured, Sarah (who was baptised as a Catholic but has never previously had any religious faith) finds herself making a vow that she will end her relationship with him if God will let him live. When she realises that Bendrix has only suffered minor injuries, Sarah believes that she must fulfil what she has vowed, even though does not know whether she believes in God. Several of Greene's other novels deal with the moral dilemmas confronting those who are already believing Catholics. Characters such as the "whisky priest" in The Power and the Glory and Scobie in The Heart of the Matter can be seen as being in search of a God in whom they believe, yet who seems to elude them. In The End of the Affair, by contrast, God is in search of Sarah, although she attempts (like Francis Thompson in his poem) to flee from Him. She is very much in love with Bendrix, and her marriage to the dull and cold Henry is a dead, loveless one. She therefore tries to convince herself that God does not exist, believing that, if there is no God, a vow made to Him is not binding on her, and that she can resume her affair with Bendrix with a clear conscience. She befriends Richard Smythe, a militant atheist whom she hears making an impassioned diatribe against religion from a soapbox on the common. In a series of meetings he lectures her on the falsity of all religious doctrines, but these have the opposite effect to that intended. The more Smythe tries to persuade her (and the more she tries to persuade herself), the more she comes to believe in God's existence. Moreover, she realises that Smythe himself (whose rage against God arises from his having been born with a disfiguring birthmark) is, in his heart, a believer. True, his is an angry and resentful belief, but anger and resentment are meaningless unless there exists a being against whom they can be directed. The geometry of the novel is more complex than a love-triangle or even than the love-quadrilateral which was suggested by another reviewer. A more accurate analogy would be with an irregular, and variable, pentagon. The five corners of the pentagon are Sarah, Henry, Bendrix, Smythe (who falls in love with Sarah) and God, separated by metaphorical distances that shrink or lengthen as the novel progresses. All the characters in this novel are flawed, but none is unsympathetic. Greene (both in this novel and more generally in his work) has a great talent for eliciting sympathy and understanding for his characters despite (or because of) their human weaknesses. This is true of the three main characters, Bendrix, Sarah and Henry, and also of lesser ones such as Smythe and Parkis, the private detective retained by Bendrix, who retains a certain dignity despite the seedy work in which he is employed. (Parkis was memorably portrayed by John Mills in the otherwise unmemorable 1955 film of the book; I have not seen the more recent film). It is because the characters are sympathetically portrayed that we can believe in their spiritual journey, as not only Sarah, but also Bendrix and Smythe, are drawn reluctantly towards God. This is a short novel, of less than 200 pages, but in that short space Greene is able to explore in some depth not only the complexities of human emotions (Thompson's phrase about "labyrinthine ways" seems particularly apt) but also philosophical issues relating to faith and the existence of God. An excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: "What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is."
Review: One rainy night, in post WWII London, writer Maurice Bendrix accidentally runs into Henry Miles. Bendrix had an affair with Sarah Miles a few years previously, but Sarah abruptly ended the affair with no explanation. Bendrix is extremely bitter about his relationship with Sarah, and when Henry confides that he suspects that Sarah now has a lover, Bendrix leaps at the chance to find out the truth. Now all of that sounds very interesting, doesn't it? And that is exactly what I thought when I bought and read "The End of The Affair" by Graham Greene. This is the 7th novel I've read by Greene, and while I loved all the others (and would happily re-read them), "The End of the Affair" left me screaming, "quick, where's the antidote?" There were pages and pages of chest-beating, nauseating, syrupy-sweet, repetitious statements such as: "I longed again to see him," "Life was going to be happy again," and "Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him." After a few pages of this stuff, I thought I was reading some teen-aged girl's diary. The "Romeo and Juliet" aspect of relationships just isn't Greene's specialty. Towards the end of the book, when all the love bits were over, things began to get slightly more interesting, but by this point, I really wanted the book to finish, and it was only by great strength of will that I managed to get to the last page. I am a Graham Greene fan, but "The End of The Affair" just isn't up to his usual, delicious standards--displacedhuman.
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Summary: A candid observer of emotions
Review: What I love about Graham Greene is his simple and straightforward style. This is the kind of story that can easily turn drippy and snivelly in less skilled hands. Mr. Greene uses a direct and candid, but always compassionate, tone to describe the evolution of the 3 central characters, and the tragedy experienced by each one. Good, worthwhile reading.
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Summary: great classic to read!
Review: i would have never have picked this up if i hadnt joined a book club that reads classics. The narrator is angry, sad, hurt and pining for a married woman who still lives with her husband. She seemed to be wanted by lots of men which made it even more difficult for the narrator. after the woman dies, he ends up living with her husband to be near her in spirit. a great book that was hard to put down.
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