End of the Affair (Greene)

The End of the Affair
Graham Greene, 1951
Penguin Group USA
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142437988


Summary
The novel focuses on Maurice Bendrix, a rising writer during World War II in London, and Sarah Miles, the wife of an impotent civil servant. 

Bendrix and Sarah fall in love quickly, but he soon realizes that the affair will end as quickly as it began. The relationship suffers from his overt and admitted jealousy. He is frustrated by her refusal to divorce Henry, her amiable but boring husband. When a bomb blasts Bendrix's flat as he is with Sarah, he is nearly killed. After this, Sarah breaks off the affair with no apparent explanation.

Later, Bendrix is still wracked with jealousy when he sees Henry crossing the Common that separates their flats. Henry has finally started to suspect something, and Bendrix decides to go to a private detective to discover Sarah's new lover. Through her diary, he learns that, when she thought he was dead after the bombing, she made a promise to God not to see Bendrix again if he allowed him to live again. Greene describes Sarah's struggles. After her sudden death from a lung infection bought to a climax by walking on the Common in the rain, several miraculous events occur, advocating for some kind of meaningfulness to Sarah's faith. By the last page of the novel, Bendrix may have come to believe in a God as well, though not to love him. (From Wikipedia.)

The End of the Affair is the fourth and final explicitly Catholic novel by Greene. The others are Brighton Rock (1938) The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948).

The novel has been adapted twice to film: in 1955, with Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr, and in 1999, with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.