The End of the Affair

When I heard about Colin Firth reading Graham Greene's The End of the Affair over on Lakeside Musing, I knew that I had to listen to this book.  I hadn't read anything by Greene despite hearing that his writing was excellent and his themes interesting.  I contacted my library and they couldn't get a copy but provided a link to Audible.com which enabled me to download it for free!

The writing is excellent, and I absolutely loved listening to Colin Firth read to me, but the story itself left me a bit disappointed.  In a nutshell, The End of the Affair is about the end of an affair between Maurice Bendrix, novelist, and Sarah Miles, wife of a friend of Bendrix.  They began the affair in 1939 on the eve of WWII and she broke it off in 1944.  Bendrix narrates the story from 1946, when Sarah comes back in to his life. 

Here's the book description on Amazon:

This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles—a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God.


Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At the start he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. By the end of the book, Bendrix's hatred has shifted to the God he feels has broken his life but whose existence he has at last come to recognize.

Originally published in 1951, The End of the Affair was acclaimed by William Faulkner as "for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language."

I have to disagree with Faulkner.  I found the story to be contrived rather than true.  The End of the Affair is one of Greene's "Catholic" novels in which Catholicism plays a major role, and so perhaps this was not the best first Greene novel for me to read as I found it read more like a parable than a truely believable story that goes to the heart of the human condition. 

I didn't see either Bendrix or Sarah as fully realized characters, and Sarah was really shadowy. She acted in a way that was completely incomprehensible to me and I didn't much care for either major character, though I found the wronged husband, Henry, to be more believeable and sympathetic than either of the others.

Nevertheless the writing is gorgeous as is Firth's reading of it.

Graham Greene on North and South

Today's online New York Times has an excerpt from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene. The excerpt is a letter Greene wrote to "Mumma" from Sierra Leone in May of 1942.

The part that caught my eye was this:

I'm reading North and South by Mrs Gaskell at the moment. Some of it is very good - and the acid humour is most pleasant. Only people in Victorian novels do seem to behave so oddly whenever sex rears its ugly head! Tremors and horrors and indignations. Would they think we behaved oddly? perhaps they'd think just disgustingly.

He goes on to talk about a Disney movie and Trollope, but having just had a mini-discussion on Republic of Pemberley's Library board about whether Gaskell had a sense of humor or not, I thought it interesting the Greene would mention the humor in N&S and modify it as acid. I think Gaskell is much more gentle in her humor than acidic, but then I don't know that much about Graham Greene. However, just reading the blurb on Amazon makes me want to read up on him:

Greene is presented in these letters through the five main preoccupations of his life: Roman Catholicism, politics, love, travel and, certainly not least, the processes of writing and publishing. As a publisher at Eyre & Spottiswoode, and as an author in disputes with Heinemann's and Viking ("Would rather change publisher than title"), Greene gained an unusually rounded view of the business side of his profession.

Connecting back to Gaskell, she ultimately did find another publisher than Dickens (i.e., for the serialization of her novels); perhaps like Greene, she would rather "change publisher than title" as Dickens changed a title on at least one occasion.