Reflections on Reading The End of the Affair

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One does not read The End of the Affair so much as drift into its wartime fog: the rain-blurred London streets, the musty boarding houses, the suffocating memory of a love both carnal and metaphysical. It’s a novel haunted by absence - of God, of certainty, of the beloved - and at the same time obsessed with the act of recording that absence, as though narrative could somehow conjure the departed back into flesh.

It is, notoriously, an autobiographical novel. Graham Greene wrote it out of the wreckage of his affair with Catherine Walston, a married Catholic woman who, in the end, chose faith over him. Her rejection may have felt like erotic catastrophe, but in truth it was a theologically motivated severance. Greene was not simply spurned - he was displaced by God. The novel is his attempt to make sense of that dislocation, or at least to dramatise it as a kind of metaphysical wound.

Maurice Bendrix, the narrator and stand-in for Greene, is more than a jilted lover. He is a figure of spiritual envy, rage, and thwarted longing. He doesn’t just want Sarah back - he wants possession of her soul. What he cannot endure is not her absence, but her allegiance to something higher than him.

Sarah gives him up in response to a private bargain with a God she barely believes in: if Maurice survives a bombing raid, she will renounce the affair. He does survive, and she keeps her promise. Maurice, unaware of this pact until later, experiences her withdrawal as incomprehensible betrayal. When he learns the reason, he is even more furious. He has been cast aside not for another man, but for the infinite: something he cannot seduce, threaten, or disbelieve without giving it power.

Sarah is harder to pin down. Critics have long noted her pallor, her lack of psychological fire. And yet this may be precisely the point. She has already withdrawn from the drama. Greene does not write her as a passionate agent but as a woman being acted upon: by the aura of God, by her guilt and by fate. Her diary, when it appears, is less an account of inner struggle than a record of surrender. She is already half-absent, already on that other shore.

Whether Greene meant her as a portrait of Marian sanctity or simply failed to inhabit her voice is unclear. But in narrative terms, she functions as an object of devotion: not a fully realised person, but the beloved as sacrament and silence.

Then there’s Henry, Sarah’s husband. Grey, decent and baffled, he serves as the quiet satire of secular liberalism. He cannot comprehend the passions around him, neither the affair nor Sarah's conversion. He is the bureaucrat of the heart: polite, predictable, and entirely unequipped to deal with any aspect of transcendence.

So what is the rationale for the novel? What is Greene trying to tell us?

It would be easy to say it’s about faith, about Catholicism, about the disruptive force of grace. But it goes deeper. The End of the Affair is not a novel about religion so much as a novel about what happens when the person you love no longer commits heart and soul to you. Sarah's turn to God is not a rejection of Maurice - it is a reorientation of her being toward something utterly profound in her nature he cannot share. And this is what destroys him. Not the exclusion of lust, not emotional loss, but her metaphysical desertion.

Greene’s true subject is not piety but jealousy at the deepest levels of the soul. Bendrix wants to possess Sarah entirely. When he realises that he can’t - that her inner life has been given over to someone else, someone untouchable - he is driven to fury. His hatred of God is the hatred of the lover spurned by the divine. The triangle here is not Maurice–Sarah–Henry, but Maurice–Sarah–God.

And God wins, as He always has to over the Devil.

The novel works because it refuses to sentimentalise this spiritual displacement. Greene does not offer conversion as catharsis. Even at the end, Bendrix resentfully prays without belief, hates without resolution. He is the lover as accuser, the man cast out of paradise who cannot stop looking over his shoulder. In that sense, The End of the Affair is a kind of anti-romance, passion destroyed by theology.

And yet, it endures. Not because its Catholicism feels fresh (it doesn’t), or its miracles convincing (they aren’t), but because it speaks to something more perennial: the anguish of loving someone who has stepped beyond your reach. Anyone who has experienced this - whether through faith, ideology, death, or simply the quiet erosion of intimacy - will recognise its truth. Greene gives us the portrait of a soul unable to share in the transformation of the beloved, and so doomed to circle the empty space she has left behind.