“A story has no end and no beginning.” is the first line of Graham Greene’s novel “The End of an Affair” which takes place during and immediately after WWII in London.  Maurice Bendrix, a somewhat successful novelist,  is nursing a hatred for Sarah Miles, his paramour who has broken off their torrid love affair without explanation. When Bendrix (as he is called by others) meets Sarah’s husband,Henry on a rainy night on the Common, he finds the means to try to figure out why Sarah has ended their affair.  He hires a private investigator, Parkis, who determines that Sarah is seeing a man, Richard Smythe, who turns out to be a rationalist not her lover, counseling Sarah to abandon her religious views.  Parkis recovers Sarah’s diary which reveals that she still loves Bendrix but has  abandoned him to fulfill a vow she made to God. When she thought Bendrix had died in a German bombing attack, she vowed to leave him  if God would save Bendrix.  Sarah descends into Catholicism and then dies from pneumonia at least worsened by her renewed connection to Bendrix who ends up living with Henry in Sarah’s old flat.  Oy!

This novel of love and hate, infidelity and marriage, religious faith and disbelief during war is considered one of Greene’s best among his more than 25 novels written over 67 years.  Short listed for the Nobel several times, he was awarded major literary prizes.  V.S. Pritchett considered him “the most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings and who understands the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief.”

I must admit that I found the book a tad tedious with the endless complaining of Bendrix, the passive impotence of Henry, and the somewhat silly conversion and fulfillment of her vow by Sarah. I may have also been influenced by vague memories of seeing the movie (there have been two adaptations for the cinema) and remembering Ralph Fiennes standing in the dust of the bombed out flat and finding Greene’s Bendrix lacking by comparison.

Nonetheless, Greene was a major British writer of the 20th C and warranted another read. I liked his earlier book “The Heart of the Matter” better, and I think you will too should you choose to read one of his books.