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| The End of the Affair (Vintage Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Graham Greene
Creator: Monica Ali
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 8884
Media: Paperback
Edition: cenetenary ed
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0099478447
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099478447
ASIN: 0099478447
Publication Date: October 7, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another and love of God. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom--we were together in desire". Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for:"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 with a chance... People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You". Bendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalisation. Writing to God in her journal, she says:"You willed our separation, but he [Bendrix] willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You". It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible--perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. In her final years, Sarah's faith only deepens, even as she remains haunted by the bombing and the power of her own attraction to God. Set against the backdrop of a war-ravaged city, The End of the Affair is equally haunting as it lays forth the question of what constitutes love in troubling, unequivocal terms. --Melanie Rehak
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Dark, disturbing, passionate and beautiful July 25, 2008
This is a book about darkness and light, but mostly darkness.
It is about jealousy, vengeance, bitterness, loathing - I could go on. A deeply passionate and angry man, the narrator falls in love with a married woman who then inexplicably leaves him one day after a close shave with a bomb in war-torn London.
Then follows his quest to uncover why she left. I don't want to spoil what comes next by telling any more, but it is such a moving book. I was moved to tears by the beauty of it when I first read it, aged 15, and it still has the same effect, some (quite a few) years later.
The space between us July 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Anyone who has lived in London could place the Common that forms a geographical centrepiece in The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. It doesn't really matter if it's the particular place one thinks it is, because it's what happens in the houses at or near its periphery that is central to the book. And the relationships between man and woman, between classes, between interests could be anywhere.
Maurice Bendrix is a resident of the suburban, unfashionable, southern extremity of the open space. He has rented rooms in which he labours over his writing. He is a novelist with several books and some critical acclaim to his name. He is a passionate man, a sceptic, perhaps in every sense, and he is nothing less than scheming in the way that he manipulates friends, acquaintances and probably anyone in order to conduct his research, and perhaps to secure his other interests as well. It was during one such foray into the mind of a fictional civil servant he was trying to invent that he began to see Sarah Miles. She was the wife of a real civil servant and the affair was constructed to enter her husband's mind, though it took a more conventional initial route.
Sarah and Henry, her ministry mandarin husband, live in a large freehold on the fashionable north side of the Common. One feels that, left entirely to his own devices, Maurice would not have a great deal in common with the lifestyle of the Miles household. But when he meets Sarah, he finds a passionate woman whose devotion to the institution of her marriage is not matched by the satisfaction she derives from it. Sarah's frustrations are great, her needs are obvious, and the affair with Maurice ignites.
Their passionate, highly physical affair lasts some years. One day in 1944, however, a robot bomb lands outside Maurice's house and he is injured in the blast. Initially Sarah thinks he is dead. Then, somehow, their relationship ends, maybe because she seems almost disappointed that he has survived. They see nothing of one another for two years.
Maurice, of course, assumes she has moved on to richer pastures, to another more novel lover, who can satisfy her demands in new, less committed ways. He hires a private detective to check on her. He talks to her husband and others with whom she has been acquainted. What he discovers is a surprising change of direction in her life and her priorities, a change that neither he nor Sarah's husband can either explain or accept.
Ultimately The End Of The Affair is about the space between people. Relationships are always limited, no matter how intimately they are shared. The Common, the geographical space between Maurice and Sarah, becomes a symbol of the no man's land that must be crossed when people interact. We enter into this territory when it is our intention to go part-way to meet the psyche of another, but perhaps we never really leave home. The territory can only be entered, but probably not crossed, when there is mutuality, at least a partially shared desire to meet in the unsafe space. But it remains a position that can be retracted, a space that can be abandoned at will.
But what emerges in The End Of the Affair is that this space is specific to particular relationships. Scratch the surface of a different association of that same person, and it will reveal a different territory, perhaps not even sharing recognisable landmarks with the first. Perhaps, therefore, we project onto others what we want them to be. Perhaps relationships are never really shared, and remain at best pragmatic and, more likely, ultimately selfish. In the end, The End Of The Affair suggests that they are not, but it is only a suggestion.
A Gem April 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I recently re watched the film as I loved that very much and it put me in the notion for reading the book. Boy was it worth it. A fantastic story written first from Brendrix's perspective and then through Sarah's. I found the ending made much more sense than the ending chosen in the film.
I enjoyed following the ups and downs of their relationship and Greene's insight was so enthralling. I can quite easily see myself reading this book again before the year is out.
 Gripping and quite poignant January 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An interesting study of sexual and emotional jealousy and insecurity. The edning is very downbeat and bitter.
One of the best British novels ever. November 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Greene's best, in my opinion. Set in 1940s London, it tells the story of a doomed love affair between intense, jealous writer Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, wife of seemingly weak and boring civil servant Henry. When Sarah suddenly breaks off her relationship with Bendrix, it leaves him angry and confused and he is determined to find out the truth.
This whole novel is a great example in how to write about a total lack of control in an incredible controlled fashion. Greene takes Bendrix and..unfolds him, layer by layer. Intense throughout, Bendrix tortures himself (and others) in varying degrees, takes pleasure in his own pain, rejoices in it, hates it, despairs of it. But Greene stretches him just enough, then brings him back, and then stretches him again. It's emotionally exhausting following Bendrix's tortured psyche through such a rollercoaster. It's almost painful watching a man turn himself inside out while trying to understand what malicious influence has taken Sarah away from him. Bendrix may be a very dislikeable character, but one can't help feeling sorry for him as he rails and gnashes and cries against the injustices forced upon him.
Aside from Bendrix, Sarah and Henry are both incredible well drawn and given their own roles to play. All are tortured in various ways, and yet this torture manifests itself in different ways. Bendrixes way is certainly the most evident, but is his pain the more excruciating?
I consider this book to be one of the finest ever by a British novelist. The film adaption is excellent, but the book is a tightly controlled, claustrophobic masterpiece that begs to be read and re-read...and then read again.
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