Maurice Bendix is very good at brooding, in fact his brooding can extend to just about anything. At the opening of this novel he broods about the opening of novels in a metafictional tone that may have seemed adventurous at the time, but seems distinctly ordinary nowadays. Then he goes on to talk about hate a lot.
Our narrator seems determined to colour the whole novel the darkest shade of black, offering only occasional light relief through a bumbling private detective Parkis and his trusty sidekick. Through his immense depression, the reader is pulled into the darkest recesses of Bendix's soul searching as he contemplates his stormy affair with Sarah, wife of the far-to-amiable-for-his-own-good civil servant Henry Miles. The novel starts some time after the affair has ended for unknown reasons and Maurice has been left broken and filled with hate. Henry unwisely places the idea to set a private detective on Sarah into Bendix's head, and things deteriorate from here on in. Why did the affair end? What is the boundary between love and hate, are they one and the same? And how much are we meant to read into the ominous comment at the end of Chapter One?
We start off liking Bendix, which is good as we have to spend a great deal of time with him, but as his obsession with Sarah is reignited he changes from satirical, downbeat observer (he is a writer after all) to jealous maniac. The increasingly crazed, inhuman Bendix begins spouting all sorts of self-loathing remarks, but occasionally he has something very intelligent to say: "In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
Nevertheless, it's never good to have a narrator/protagonist who's all "Me! Me! Me!". Nick Carraway learns to take a backseat, occasionally throwing the odd barbed comment while he lets his idol, Jay Gatsby dominate. Great Expectations, the book that inspired Greene to attempt a first person narrative, was led by the charming Pip. True, he made some fairly naff decisions, but his concern for others, his fascination with the world around him and his biting, but not over-the-top, self criticism gave the epic novel its character. In The End of the Affair, Bendix's only interest in others is to insult them and tell them how they haven't got it as bad as him. In effect, he's acting like a stroppy teenager, and the reader may have an overwhelming urge to yell at him to "get over it". After all, Greene only portrays his longing for Sarah as sexual desire, so its hard to have much sympathy for him.
But aside for our moaning narrator, the book has many merits. For starters it conducts one of the greatest literary U-turns I've ever experienced, introducing its main theme of religion more than halfway through the novel. Apart from fleeting references to God at the beginning, it seemed like it would be a straightforward examination of the nature of love. But when Maurice gets hold of Sarah's diary, a huge chunk of the book is dedicated to her Catholic guilt, and the novel's conclusion is fraught with religious angst.
Sarah's section is actually the strongest in the novel. It does that wondrous trick of reinterpreting everything that's gone before (much like the divine psychoanalysis at the end of Sebastien Faulk's Engleby). While Maurice at times simply appears sexually frustrated, you can sense Sarah's world falling apart around her. Her awakening conscience seems destined to lead to her doom from the start.
While Greene's novel is unlikely to make you believe in God by its series of flimsy 'miracles', it does suggest the implications of a God and the pain of belief. Would you really want a God that kept you in an unhappy marriage and tore you apart from the ones that you love? Bendix is caught in the unpleasant situation of being adamant that he will remain an immoral person, but unable not to believe in God. You sense that if the novel where to continue, Bendix would take the same path of self destruction as his lover.
So The End of the Affair isn't groundbreaking, but it plays with some serious themes in an entertaining manner, although at times you feel you may be crushed under the weight of despair. The novel has flaws, Smythe seems to be simply an object for Bendix's hate and an antithesis to Sarah's developing Catholicism, but if you accept these flaws then satisfaction is guaranteed.
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