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Title: The End of the Affair (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0-14-018495-3 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (100 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Simply Fabulous...
Comment: Greene's "The End of the Affair" is nothing short of a masterpiece. After I picked it up I could not put it down, and I have read it several times since.Greene's depiction of the emotion of love found and lost is heart wrenching. You feel his words, and empathize with his pain. This book was written from Greene's own experience, and can be seen as autobiographical to his own depictions of love. This book is a must read for understanding the true raw emotion of love, and the emotions that stem from it's loss. You won't read a page without prolific questioning of the topics of: jealousy, hate, love, and God. It's meaning has added to all conversations about love with it's asking: "Can hate only stem for those who we once loved",and "Can jealousy only exist with desire?"
Rating: 5
Summary: The nature of love.....and God
Comment: Graham Greene's "The End Of The Affair" is one of the most powerful and gripping books I have read all year. If I had to describe in a word or a phrase what the novel is about, I'd say it's about the nature of love. Does love between human beings share the same source as that between Man and his creator ? The question of faith and Catholicism in particular has long been a favourite theme of Greene's and here he digs deep and mines it to the fullest. The novel's unique structure and way the love story between Maurice and Sarah is told with multiple flashbacks gives it an expansive romantic sweep that lends itself to cinematic adaptation. I have yet to see the film version but if it succeeds in capturing the essence of the novel, it promises to be breathtaking. Oddly enough, I detect shades of the grand love affair between Count Almasey and Katherine Clifton in "The English Patient". Just when you think the novel has reached its emotional climax, Greene surprises by going the extra mile to infuse the denouement with a deeply religious flavour that is simply brilliant. The execution is deftly handled, never threatening to overload the love story with heavy duty meaning. "The End Of The Affair" makes for wonderful reading. Don't miss it !
Rating: 4
Summary: Down the Labyrinthine Ways
Comment: "I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter".
(Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven)
On a damp January evening in 1946, Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, meets an old friend, Henry Miles, a senior civil servant, on Clapham Common. Miles confides to Bendrix that he suspects his attractive young wife, Sarah, of having an affair, and that he has considered having her watched by a private detective. Miles is unaware that Bendrix himself was Sarah's lover for several years, although she broke off the affair without explanation in 1944.
Bendrix, who has been tortured by jealousy ever since Sarah ended their affair, and who suspects her of having abandoned him for another lover, instructs a private detective himself to watch her and to obtain her diary. From this he discovers that the truth is stranger than he had thought. During a bombing raid, Bendrix was knocked unconscious when his house was struck by a V1 flying bomb. Believing him to be dead or fatally injured, Sarah (who was baptised as a Catholic but has never previously had any religious faith) finds herself making a vow that she will end her relationship with him if God will let him live. When she realises that Bendrix has only suffered minor injuries, Sarah believes that she must fulfil what she has vowed, even though does not know whether she believes in God.
Several of Greene's other novels deal with the moral dilemmas confronting those who are already believing Catholics. Characters such as the "whisky priest" in The Power and the Glory and Scobie in The Heart of the Matter can be seen as being in search of a God in whom they believe, yet who seems to elude them. In The End of the Affair, by contrast, God is in search of Sarah, although she attempts (like Francis Thompson in his poem) to flee from Him. She is very much in love with Bendrix, and her marriage to the dull and cold Henry is a dead, loveless one. She therefore tries to convince herself that God does not exist, believing that, if there is no God, a vow made to Him is not binding on her, and that she can resume her affair with Bendrix with a clear conscience. She befriends Richard Smythe, a militant atheist whom she hears making an impassioned diatribe against religion from a soapbox on the common. In a series of meetings he lectures her on the falsity of all religious doctrines, but these have the opposite effect to that intended. The more Smythe tries to persuade her (and the more she tries to persuade herself), the more she comes to believe in God's existence. Moreover, she realises that Smythe himself (whose rage against God arises from his having been born with a disfiguring birthmark) is, in his heart, a believer. True, his is an angry and resentful belief, but anger and resentment are meaningless unless there exists a being against whom they can be directed.
The geometry of the novel is more complex than a love-triangle or even than the love-quadrilateral which was suggested by another reviewer. A more accurate analogy would be with an irregular, and variable, pentagon. The five corners of the pentagon are Sarah, Henry, Bendrix, Smythe (who falls in love with Sarah) and God, separated by metaphorical distances that shrink or lengthen as the novel progresses.
All the characters in this novel are flawed, but none is unsympathetic. Greene (both in this novel and more generally in his work) has a great talent for eliciting sympathy and understanding for his characters despite (or because of) their human weaknesses. This is true of the three main characters, Bendrix, Sarah and Henry, and also of lesser ones such as Smythe and Parkis, the private detective retained by Bendrix, who retains a certain dignity despite the seedy work in which he is employed. (Parkis was memorably portrayed by John Mills in the otherwise unmemorable 1955 film of the book; I have not seen the more recent film). It is because the characters are sympathetically portrayed that we can believe in their spiritual journey, as not only Sarah, but also Bendrix and Smythe, are drawn reluctantly towards God.
This is a short novel, of less than 200 pages, but in that short space Greene is able to explore in some depth not only the complexities of human emotions (Thompson's phrase about "labyrinthine ways" seems particularly apt) but also philosophical issues relating to faith and the existence of God. An excellent book.
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Title: The Heart of the Matter (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140283323 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185003 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, John Updike ISBN: 0142437301 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184937 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Third Man by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140286829 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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