A novel that examines love, faith, fidelity, and saintliness, The End of the Affair is one of Greene’s Catholic novels, along with Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and A Burnt-Out Case (1961). This novel has been the basis for two successful film adaptations of the same name: the 1955 version was directed by Edward Dmytryk and starred Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson, and the 1999 version was directed by Neil Jordan and starred Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.
The protagonist and first-person narrator, Maurice Bendrix, works as a professional writer—a novelist—in London, and his story seems to unfold directly from Bendrix’s mind to the page, revealing his observations of the people in his fictional world and his more general comments about character, plot, and narration. This storytelling strategy is an early and partial example of what eventually comes to be known as postmodernism: Greene, a novelist, is writing a novel about a novelist who analyzes and interprets his world as if it were the stuff of fiction; this strategy, however, is ancillary to the realistic exploration of love and faith.
The story opens in 1946, two years after the end of Bendrix’s affair with Sarah Miles, the wife of an acquaintance of his, Henry Miles. Bendrix is angry and hurt because Sarah broke off the affair without cause or explanation; he assumes that she has gone on to some other lover in preference to him. He’s sure she didn’t simply decide to observe her marriage vows, and he is sure Henry never learned of the affair.
In the first of the novel’s many ironic twists, Bendrix encounters Henry one rain-soaked evening and finds that he is contemplating whether he should hire a detective to check up on Sarah, who is not always where he expects her to be nor truthful about her activities. Bendrix offers to manage the sordid business for Henry, saying he will present himself to the detective agency as a jilted lover, which is exactly what he thinks he is. Bendrix follows through in spite of Henry’s dismissal of the idea, and in the offices of Mr. Savage he presents a few more details of the affair; Savage assigns Mr. Parkis to the case, and much of the story is revealed through Bendrix’s conversations with Parkis.
Greene develops a mildly comic class-based contrast between the educated sophistication of Bendrix’s use of language and the laboriously mannered jargon of Parkis, but he avoids satire by making Parkis one of the key humanizing influences on Bendrix.
The narration divides as it moves along two timelines—one that follows the unfolding of daily events in 1944, and the other that results from the way the ongoing investigation prompts the piecemeal recollection of the affair’s progress between 1939 and 1944. Bendrix occasionally reminisces about the affair, but he can’t concentrate on it too intently because of the anger these memories arouse—anger that serves as a defense for the deep wound he received when Sarah broke off the affair. He still doesn’t understand: They had been in love, and Sarah’s marital status had been no impediment since she was sure Henry didn’t see her as anything more significant than the furniture in their home.
In an odd way, she was loyal to Henry without feeling compelled to be sexually faithful. That lack of compulsion makes a sticking point for Bendrix, convincing him that Sarah’s betrayal of Henry forms the pattern of her relations with men, including Bendrix. He loves her passionately, and yet he also fears and resents the power that his love gives her. That possessive love and the abrupt end of the affair leave him perpetually eaten up with jealousy; he secretly tries to meet the men he believes Sarah has preferred to him, including one man—a vocal rationalist—who would be handsome if his face were not disfigured on the left side.
The investigation makes an important leap forward when Parkis acquires Sarah’s journal. Bendrix the writer becomes Bendrix the reader, seeing the affair—and himself as well—through the eyes of the other party. He is shocked to learn that Sarah still loves him and that his opponent in her heart is no ordinary man.
In Sarah’s voice, the narrative thread following the affair doubles back as the journal entries recount scenes that Bendrix had already dredged up and picked over, such as the time during the blitzkrieg when a bomb exploded near their love nest. However, in spite of the fact that there is no mortal competitor stealing Sarah’s love from him, Bendrix is made to realize that he will never regain the relationship they once shared. Sarah has other secrets and other gifts of greater significance than the longing of one ordinary man to possess her exclusively.
For Bendrix, knowledge comes at a terrible price. He cannot have Sarah back, and he cannot accept the miraculous events that continually occur in connection with her. How could an adulterous woman become the saint to sick children and disfigured men? Bendrix finds himself at war with God, left with only his hate, his bitterness, and his skepticism.
Without any special effort on her part, Sarah had moved from disbelief to belief, and she had healed and soothed those who came in contact with her except for the one person she most loved and desired to help. Bendrix is left in the paradoxical position of telling the God that he does not believe in to leave him alone forever. But his obsession with confronting his competitors for Sarah’s love suggests that he may eventually, albeit unwillingly, find faith himself.
Bibliography
Isaacs, Rita. “Three Levels of Allegory in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair,” Linguistics in Literature 1, no. 1 (1975): 29–52.
Sharrock, Roger. Saints, Sinners, and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Walker, Ronald G. “World Without End: An Approach to Narrative Structure in Greene’s The End of the Affair,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 218–241.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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