Modern Classics: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
As apt titles go, Graham Greene’s The End Of The Affair has a very apt title. Not only because it centres around the demise of a past love affair and its ramifications in the present, but because the book is every bit as depressing as the title suggests.
Still, it’s a genuine classic, which grants it a certain leeway for its misery. Allegedly inspired by one of the author’s real-life close encounters, this is one of those heart-rending stories about why relationships go wrong, against a backdrop of war, authorship and religion.
The emergence of faith into this story feels sudden at first, but with a little thought, I realised it had always been there. This makes for not only an effective plot twist, but an accurate representation of how we non-spiritual types often think about religion. The idea that someone could make major decisions based on “God” doesn’t even occur to us until too late, and so it is for lead character Maurice Bendrix.
His first person narration works because Greene clearly has a very precise idea of how this person thinks. His internal monologues are rambling, yet always in character. Whether this is another sign that Bendrix is a proxy for the author is up for debate, but I don’t think we should use that as an excuse to ignore how well-written it is.
It is true that some of Bendrix’s more wordy streams of consciousness let the mind wander a little. Also, this could be as much a sign of the times as of Greene’s style, but he isn’t as friendly with the line break as I am used to. Whole dialogue back-and-forths are often conducted within a single paragraph. It’s a petty thing to complain about, but can make the reading feel like hard work.
In fact, “hard work” is a fair enough way to describe the whole book, although not necessarily in a bad way. Between love, loss and faith, Greene throws some weighty topics around and writes about them very personally. It’s probably not going to uplift you, but it does feel like a meaningful story, dealing with real things.
The Vintage Classics edition, with an introduction by Monica Ali, is £4.98 from Amazon.
Post by Nick Bryan
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