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Rating:  -
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Intense, lyrical, true. Perhaps the greatest obsession novel ever written and one of the greatest love stories. At 153 pages, there is nothing superflous or unnecessary.
Rating: -
Be prepared for a completely different story. Oh, the same elements are there: the setting is London during and post World WarII, the characters are basically the same (though there was a merging of the Lancelot and rationalist "preacher" in the film), but the insight and heart of the story are quite distinct. I had seen the film and loved it so my mum (Irish Catholic one at that) bought me the book and it's easy to see why. This is not a love story (or triangle) between people; it's between human nature and God (specifically Catholicism). Sarah is married to a bland but wealthy man and has various affairs but never falls in love until she meets Maurice (an acquaintance of her husband). They have a passionate affair and then, right after Maurice has a near fatal experience, she breaks off the relationship without any explanation to him. Years later, he meets her again and becomes obsessed with discovering why she left. That's the end of the similarities. In the film, Sarah runs off with Maurice and breaks her promise to God only to find that she has an incurable illness. In the book (I hope I'm not giving anything away. This book is about the journey and not the destination), she keeps her promise to God but sacrifices herself. This is a beautiful book even if you are a Secularist like myself. One line will stay with you forever "I hate you, God. I hate you as if you existed". It sums up the book; the epic struggle between our human love and our duty to God; the pleasures of this life verses obeying the divine. You might not agree with Sarah's choice (I didn't), but there is a great nobility in her sacrifice that touches the very heart of even this skeptic. It is a beautiful classic that works both as a love story between Sarah and Maurice, and as a love story/struggle between humanity and God. Simply beautiful.
Rating: -
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.
Rating: -
To start with, I am a Greene fanatic, so you might take my opinion with a grain of salt. I didn't read The End of the Affair for many years after I'd read virtually all of Greene's other novels. I love his thrillers, his adventures, his "serious" works. But I didn't think I'd love a book about an adulterous affair, particularly one with God and Catholicism at its center. I finally got around to it. How wrong, wrong, wrong I was.
Having read it twice, I now have to ask whether it's Greene's best book. Every aspect of the book is unexpected: the reason their affair ends, why she leaves, who the man she's seeing is, Bendrix's response, all the way to the end where Bendrix befriends her husband.
What in other hands would have been a simple morality play, is so much more thrilling. An absolute masterpiece, unlike anything else written by GG (or anyone else).
Rating:  -
I hadn't seen the movie when I read this book, so I had no real expectations for it, other than the fact that it is a so-called "classic".
It was a quick read, possibly because I found myself skimming over the repetitive bits, and there were pages of them. The final two pages of Sarah's journal are repeated twice word-for-word a few pages later. I'm surprised to see such a successful short story writer being so uneconomical with words. After Sarah died, there were still 100 pages of the book left. I thought, what else can there possibly be? Answer: 100 more pages of angst.
I was trying to figure out why I didn't find Sarah very interesting and finally I realized what it was: She has no job. She does nothing with her life, except sit around angsting, taking the odd walk and going to the cinema, and cheating on her husband to relieve the boredom. Her meals are cooked for her, the house is cleaned for her by the maid and she has no children to look after. Heaven forbid she do some volunteer work and help other people instead of sitting around sulking. I can't imagine a duller existence. Isn't good fiction supposed to edit out the dull parts of life? Not in this book. The boredom of Sarah's days is lovingly described at length. It wasn't long before I was feeling bored too.
Now we get to the book's worst offense. At one point, I suddenly understood the subtext of this book. Here it is:
[Psst! Hey reader, it's ME, the author! Y'know when the characters are talking to God? They're really talking to ME! You know when Sarah was on her knees, *naked* praying? She was really praying to ME to save Maurice, because, I have the power to bring people back to life! Y'know who resurrected Maurice and did all those miracles? Yup. ME! Sarah thought she loved Maurice, but she really loved ME! She loved me so much she gave up everything for ME!]
I realize every author has a god complex to some extent, but I've never seen it slapped on the page in such a blatant and graceless fashion.
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