The End of an Affair- Graham Greene

The End of an Affair is a semi-autobiographical novel, written from the perspective of an up and coming novelist, and set with the back drop of World War II. The protagonist Maurice Bendrix starts an affair with his friend’s wife Sarah. Sarah’s husband is a civil servant whose impotence and general dullness leads her towards other men, but Maurice struggles to cope when she cuts off their affair without an explanation.

This is the last in a series of novels written by Greene which focus on Catholicism and religious belief. Through Greene’s protagonist many questions are raised of religion, such as whether belief in God can lead to a sense of loneliness and whether or not it injects false hope into people. Therefore it’s possible that Greene wrote these novels in an attempt to propose and make sense of these big questions himself. The character of Sarah is loosely based on a lover Greene once had, further demonstrating the autobiographical nature of the novel.

A bomb strikes outside Maurice’s house and Sarah find him limp underneath the dislodged door. Believing him dead she prays that if God brings him back she will leave Maurice and repent her adulterous sins. Maurice was merely unconsciousness and when he rises from the ‘dead’ Sarah slowly but surely starts believing in God.

One book review describes the novel as a “three-way collision between love of self, love of another and love of God.” Maurice becomes fixated in trying to find out if Sarah left him for another man and who this other man may be, before discovering that God’s presence had replaced him in Sarah’s heart. This leads to a deep resentment towards the religion that has taken away his one true love: “I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and you took her away.” 

Maurice’s resentment of religion grows into undisguised hatred. However as the novel draws to a close, Maurice seems to unwillingly draw closer and closer to the conclusion that God exists, and the novel ends with him speaking directly to God and asking to be left alone forever. This suggests that he is resigned to the fact that whether he likes it or not, God has power over him.

As well as love of God, the love depicted between Maurice and Sarah is crucial to the story. Maurice says that “there was never any question of who wanted whom- we were together in desire” and although their relationship originates from lust, it develops intensely into something else. Maurice claims “even vacancy was crowded with her”, demonstrating the ‘love of another’ that I mentioned earlier. I enjoyed the novel, and would like to read The Heart of the Matter by Greene next because it also explores Catholicism and is set in West Africa.