the end of the affair [graham greene]

The End of the Affair is a multi-faceted novel. It is all of the following: a dissertation on love and its limitations; an investigation of the catholic faith, and the notion of faith in general; a subversive portrayal of Second World War Britain; and a meditation on what it means to be British. The book’s spine is the affair between Bendrix and Sarah, who is presented as something of a femme fatale. Their affair takes place during the course of the war and is terminated by the arrival of the V-1 missiles. (A kind of anti-Slothropian trope). Neither Bendrix not Sarah’s husband, Henry, are serving in the army. They live nearby in Clapham, (the influence of the novel on McEwan’s Atonement is an interesting aside), Bendrix on the unfashionable South Side, Sarah and Henry on the smarter North. Not so close that there’s much danger of them running into one another, but close enough for Sarah to visit Bendrix’s flat without difficulty. 

The fact that Greene frames his narrative around men who didn’t fight in the war immediately suggests an anti-heroic stance. The author isn’t interested in strength, but weakness. Henry is a weak husband, who fails to satisfy Sarah on any level. Bendrix is revealed to be a fool, opening the novel talking about his hatred for Sarah, who he presumed had dumped him for another man, and Henry, before gradually realising the idiocy of this hatred as the novel unfurls. And Sarah, who seems to be the strongest of the three, dies prematurely young after contracting a bout of flu. However, within this seemingly critical narrative set-up, the characters emerge as increasingly sympathetic. Just as Bendrix’s misplaced assumptions begin to fall away, so do the reader’s. 

In addition, it’s also worth noting that Bendrix is a novelist. Greene offers plenty of details regarding his working practice. 500 words a day, without fail. The way in which the unconscious shapes the novelist’s work at all times. The duty to render those unconscious thoughts/ impulses into a coherent text. These details are fascinating and instructive. It’s hard for the reader to separate the novelist himself from his novelist character. In which case, what is the End of the Affair? A work which is the product of an exculpatory urge? An act of self-flagellation? Does Greene identify with the insipid intellectual who never got his hands dirty in the war? And if not, why pick such an unsympathetic figure as a guide to love and faith? 

These are too many questions which in a sense only serve to illustrate the complexity of Greene’s text. A complexity which is echoed in the structure, as the novel flits back and forth across the timeframe of the affair in a non-linear fashion. Firstly, the novel picks up two years after the affair has ended. Then it doubles back to recount how the affair began. There’s a crucial account of the affair’s final moments, when the doodlebug struck. Then, audaciously, the author allows himself the contrivance of the discovery of Sarah’s diary, which means we revisit the narrative all over again from a second perspective. Thereafter, the novel jumps forward towards a kind of present, wound up in the days that follow Sarah’s untimely and slightly convenient death. 

This structural inquietude, along with the meditations on Catholicism, do not appear, at first sight, particularly British. It’s almost as though, just as the narrative of Britain’s glorious victory in the war is being burnished, (a narrative which is far easier to sell for the second than the first world war), Greene sets out to make a counter-narrative.  The dominant narrative still resonates, politically and culturally: Britain’s greatness and heroism, a narrative for internal consumption, which helped to gloss over the crimes of colonialism, helped to fuel the endless identity crisis with regard to Europe and could be said to have found its latest instalment in the go-it-along bravura of Brexit, should one choose to see it that way. But Greene chooses to focus on a few underwhelming metropolitan types. And, it seems to this reader, revels in their messiness, their awkwardness, their anti-heroism. This is Hamlet Britain, not the Henry the Fifth version. And I would argue that these values: awkwardness, anti-heroism, a reluctance to fight, an understanding of the messiness of life which means that, after Sarah’s death, Bendrix actually ends up living with Henry in a morbid menage a trois, (minus one), which are the attributes that distinguish the British. Not for nothing did we used to be masters of the slightly sordid art of diplomacy, an art which involves recognising the unfeasibility of an unambiguous standpoint. As Hamlet gleaned, life is far too complex for absolutes. Bendrix tries to arm himself with a shield of hatred, but as the book goes on he realises how foolish he has been to do so. 

Greene adds the great irony that the only surefire winner in life is a god that might not exist. That’s where he and Beckett perhaps overlap. The Catholicism almost seems to railroad the last part of the novel,  which goes to far as suggest, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, that Sarah attained some kind of sainthood. It’s of course possible to view the issue of religion as fundamental to the novel, but it seems to me that it’s a red herring. The real substance of the novel is tied up in the title. The contemplation of God occurs after the contemplation of love has been forcibly abandoned.