Rating: 
Summary: A Twentieth Century Classic
Review: The End of the Affair is an incredible book by a brilliant author. Not only is it profound in its treatment of love and religion, but the scene it paints of wartime England is vivid. The details are often witty, the book as a whole is intense.
Rating:
Summary: A terribly real account of how painful love can be.
Review: This book has become one of my favourites and I often reread it. While it is supposedly fiction in reality it was written by Greene during or after an affair he had with his great love Mrs Walston. Like the narrator of the book Greene could never marry Mrs Walston and he really was tortured by this. I am a big Greene fan but this is my favourite book of his. READ IT!
Rating:
Summary: A profound work tackling issues of love, faith and hate.
Review: This book is one of my all-time favorites. While it ostensibly focuses on an extra-marital affair, the real issues are ones of love and faith. The book effectively explores the fine line between love and hate and how this relates to God and the
church. It touches on real emotion and details the
agonizing difficulties of true faith.
Rating:
Summary: love and hate, intense story
Review: I saw the movie first, and found it very engaging. In the moive the writer said "What can one write about happiness", and it made me want to read the book. The movie has a different ending, but it captures the hate theme of the book. The book is written in a very emotional way. When I was reading it, I could feel all what the narrator was feeling. All the hate and the love and the jealousy and the despair are so human, and everyone can quickly identify with those emotions. The discussions about God and about time have generated a lot of thoughts in me. Besides the content, it is a very well-written book. It feels so true. I wonder if it is based on a true story. That's all I have to say about this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Radiant Hope in the Midst of the Desert
Review: A Catholic friend of mine recommended this book as a quick but wonderful weekend read. Although the book is clearly titled "The End of the Affair," I little anticipated what I was getting into. Indeed, this book explores the winding down of a passionate affair between Bendrix (your main narrator) and Mrs. Sarah Miles. As much as I favor modern British literature, reading a tormented, neurotic man's twisted thoughts was not exactly my idea of a great weekend read. For the first half of the book, I greatly doubted my friend's reading recommendations.However, like in "Till We Have Faces," I found the second half of the book more than justified the first half's wanderings. Greene uses much of the first half of the book to set the stage; he introduces the main characters, their incredibly complex relations, and their current miseries. In light of the second half of the book, I have a heightened appreciation of the first half. This understood, the thing I truly admire in the first part is Greene's ability and willingness to capture how multi-faceted our feelings towards others often are. Novelists often tritely portray a woman's husband and her lover as bitter enemies; Greene does no such thing. Love and hate are always shown as polar opposites, but Greene shows how they are two sides of the same coin. Bendrix (and thus Greene) dwells on the characters' glaring flaws of jealousy, passivity, hypocrisy, infidelity, and vast emptiness, and yet a careful reader is able to discern that these characters are truly good. I have no idea how he does this except for the sympathy that comes from extreme transparency. I don't want to give away what happens towards the end; indeed, it is so complex that I don't know that I could relate it if I tried. However, as mentioned in other reviews, there is essentially a gravitational pull towards God despite the fact that none of the characters really believe in God. This book is in no way preachy as nothing - and I mean NOTHING - is preached to the reader as to how he should think, feel or believe. The author simply shows that through all the swirl of action and emotion, the one thing that continues to make sense is the existence and love of God. And the presence of this God suddenly hallows the characters that you instinctively knew were good all along. Greene's exploration and approach to such faith are completely brand new to me. He might have a distinct Catholic perspective or he might just revel in God's love for the realistically sinful man. Either way, I was left at the end with a strong sense that Greene was a master craftsman. He was such a craftsman that I didn't catch on to how he pulled off all he was able to pull off by the end. It's been awhile since I've read such a truly well-written masterpiece, and I am thankful to have read this one.
Rating:
Summary: Greene's Catholicism fetishism gets to be nauseating
Review: Some critic once described AMADEUS as a "love triangle with God at the apex". The same could be said of AFFAIR. You know how some desperate people resort to making a deal with God? "Grant me such-and-such a favor, God, and I'll do such-and-such for You." That behavioral cliche is the premise of AFFAIR.
I was impressed by the narrator's hateful jealousy: "I got no reply and then I gave up hope and remembered exactly what she had said. 'People go on loving God, don't they, all their lives without seeing Him?' I thought with hatred, she always has to show up well in her own mirror: she mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble to herself."
But I was downright nauseated by Greene's Catholic monomania. Whereby spirituality always gets to be represented by Catholicism. Even Sarah's mother turns out to be a Catholic. Why couldn't she have been a Presbyterian or a Druid? Just to break up the monotony.
Rating:
Summary: "I want ordinary corrupt human love."
Review: This is a religious novel about profound human suffering. Originally published in 1951, Penguin Classics recently published a centennial edition of Graham Greene's "Catholic novel," THE END OF THE AFFAIR, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. The story is autobiographical. In his excellent Introduction to this new edition, Michael Gorra reveals that Greene rather casually converted to Catholicism in 1926 to appease his fiancee, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and that Greene's novel was based upon his own obsessive affair with Catherine Walston, which lasted for much of the 1950s (pp. vii; xiv). (Greene dedicated his book "TO C.") THE END OF THE AFFAIR is as much "a record of hate" (p. 1) as love story, and it it is actually about the end of two relationships: the end of Sarah Miles' adulterous relationship with the narrator, Maurice Bendix, and the end of Bendix's relationship with God. Whereas her adultery leads Sarah to sainthood, it leads Bendix to living hell. "O God," he prays bitterly at the end of the novel, "You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and too old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever" (p. 160).
Set in London during World War II, the novel gives Bendix a mystery to solve: why did Sarah end their affair on a June day in 1944 without explanation, saying only that "people go on loving God, don't they, all their lives without seeing Him?" (p. 58). Bendrix, a writer admired (like Greene) for his "technical ability," meets Sarah at a party thrown by Sarah's dull, civil-servant husband, Henry Miles. "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom," Bendix recalls, "we were together in desire." The affair burns on for several years until Bendrix is knocked unconscious by a bomb during an afternoon tryst. Believing her lover is dead, Sarah immediately makes a promise to God by praying, "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive . . . I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive." When Bendrix recovers, Sarah keeps her promise, and Bendix's love soon turns to hate. Years later in 1946, after befriending Sarah's husband Henry, Bendix learns that Henry is suspicious that Sarah is involved in an affair. This prompts Bendrix to hire a private detective, which leads him to the discovery that his only rival is God.
Reading THE END OF THE AFFAIR is experiencing Graham Greene at the heights of his ability as a writer.
G. Merritt
Rating: 
Summary: More spiritual than romantic
Review: Graham Greene's "End of the Affair" begins with an interesting premise. In war-torn London, married Sarah Miles has an adulterous affair with the writer Maurice Bendrix, but suddenly she leaves him without explanation. Later, Bendrix befriends Sarah's dull husband Henry. When Henry confides his suspicion that his wife is cheating on him, the jealous Bendrix hires a private detective to discover why Sarah left him and who has taken his place. Tracking Sarah to a mysterious meeting with another man and gaining access to her diary, Bendrix finds that his rival is very tough competition indeed. In spite of the interesting build-up, however, the plot then wanders off in several directions at once, and the result is a hodgepodge of side stories featuring the private detective and his son, the relationship between Bendrix and Henry, the spiritual awakening in Sarah's life, and a series of miracles that impact the lives of the novel's characters.
This story has semi-autobiographical overtones. Greene, a Catholic who pondered the relationship between adultery and religious belief, wrote a series of novels concerning God, faith, and human and divine love. This one is the culmination of that series, where God takes an active role in people's lives. It has also been postulated that the illicit affair between Bendrix and Sarah was modeled after one of Greene's own wartime love affairs.
There are some interesting conjectures about the nature of love and hate that provide food for thought, although Greene's repetitious phrases soon became tedious, with such dialogue as "If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself I really hate?" I found none of the characters in this story likeable or believable. The men were are weak-willed and indecisive. Sarah, who called herself "a phony and a fake," did not seem like the kind of woman a man would become obsessed with. Her personality was a conflicting mix of saintliness and indifference. The relationship between Bendrix and Sarah was not memorable, and there seemed to be more contention between them than love. Although the book is short, it seemed to continue beyond the logical ending point, and after a while I was more interested in the story ending than in the end of the affair. If you are looking for a novel that addresses faith and the nature of God, you will enjoy this book. But if you are looking for a good love story, look elsewhere.
Eileen Rieback
Rating:
Summary: A story has no beginning... or end?
Review: A book for anyone who has ever been left so heartbroken and frustrated that they can't even speak without launching into a bitter lament against such superficial feelings as love, faith and devotion. Greene's genius was always his ability to create lasting and believable characters that jostled with issues that were central to the writer, but also, could be understood and re-interpreted by the reader. In The End of the Affair, it is his own sense of heartbreak following a real-life affair he began during the war that acts as the central crux of the emotional and heartbreaking story, that is here, taken further by elements of fictitious fantasy, religious guilt and what must be one of the greatest uses of a self-referential narrative arc ever developed in post-war-literary history.
Here, Greene recasts himself as the dolorous writer Bendrix, who, without even realising it until it is too late, has fallen into a passionate and illicit affair with Sarah, the wife of his meek (and perhaps impotent) friend and associate Henry. Greene juggles the perspectives so that each of this troika get to express their feelings (which are actually the varied conscious voices of the author), in order to further the story, as well as acting as something of an essay into infidelity, obsession, guilt and bereavement. The story could have easily fallen into the realms of melodrama, prefiguring those turgid disease-of-the-week films like Love Story (and so on), but Greene is able to break down the melancholy with elements of a detective story, with Bendrix involving himself in unravelling an affair that turns out to be nothing but an after shock.
There are also elements of black comedy, an intelligent analysis of catholic-angst and an interesting use of character perspective, as Greene changes the view of the story mid-way from Bendrix to Sarah (then later, back again!) in order to tell the story from both points-of-view... a device that allows Greene to look at the two disparate sides of the tale, and also, to further develop the subtle nuances of the characters. The writing is fantastic throughout, with Greene ably conjuring the decaying embers of Post World War II London; whilst the blitz-set love scenes burn with a passion and intensity that few British writers (of Greene's generation) could equate (for more genius, see Brighton Rock!).
The End of the Affair is a great book that still manages to convey that all-important sense of loss, guilt and sadness with a vitriol that seems fierce enough to tear through a brick wall, whilst screaming in the face of pious notions of reminisce and forgiveness (in a typically 50's 'very-English' sort-of-way, of course). As others have said before, certain notions in regards to the politics and sociology of the piece have dated in the decades that have passed since the book's first publication, but this is hardly cause for despair. The book's reason for being has always been about the relationship between the three characters, the notions discussed above and the emotional connection created between the story, the characters and the reader. On these counts, The End of the Affair is a relevant today as it was when first created.
Rating:
Summary: Radiant Hope in the Midst of the Desert
Review: A Catholic friend of mine recommended this book as a quick but wonderful weekend read. Although the book is clearly titled "The End of the Affair," I little anticipated what I was getting into. Indeed, this book explores the winding down of a passionate affair between Bendrix (your main narrator) and Mrs. Sarah Miles. As much as I favor modern British literature, reading a tormented, neurotic man's twisted thoughts was not exactly my idea of a great weekend read. For the first half of the book, I greatly doubted my friend's reading recommendations. However, like in "Till We Have Faces," I found the second half of the book more than justified the first half's wanderings. Greene uses much of the first half of the book to set the stage; he introduces the main characters, their incredibly complex relations, and their current miseries. In light of the second half of the book, I have a heightened appreciation of the first half. This understood, the thing I truly admire in the first part is Greene's ability and willingness to capture how multi-faceted our feelings towards others often are. Novelists often tritely portray a woman's husband and her lover as bitter enemies; Greene does no such thing. Love and hate are always shown as polar opposites, but Greene shows how they are two sides of the same coin. Bendrix (and thus Greene) dwells on the characters' glaring flaws of jealousy, passivity, hypocrisy, infidelity, and vast emptiness, and yet a careful reader is able to discern that these characters are truly good. I have no idea how he does this except for the sympathy that comes from extreme transparency. I don't want to give away what happens towards the end; indeed, it is so complex that I don't know that I could relate it if I tried. However, as mentioned in other reviews, there is essentially a gravitational pull towards God despite the fact that none of the characters really believe in God. This book is in no way preachy as nothing - and I mean NOTHING - is preached to the reader as to how he should think, feel or believe. The author simply shows that through all the swirl of action and emotion, the one thing that continues to make sense is the existence and love of God. And the presence of this God suddenly hallows the characters that you instinctively knew were good all along. Greene's exploration and approach to such faith are completely brand new to me. He might have a distinct Catholic perspective or he might just revel in God's love for the realistically sinful man. Either way, I was left at the end with a strong sense that Greene was a master craftsman. He was such a craftsman that I didn't catch on to how he pulled off all he was able to pull off by the end. It's been awhile since I've read such a truly well-written masterpiece, and I am thankful to have read this one.
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