![]() ![]() The narrative scaffolding of Greene-land has been dismantled, leaving us with a novel that gains extraordinary intensity from the narrowness of its focus. Gone are the tropical locations, the revolutions and gangsters. The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks. ![]() 'The End of the Affair' is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn't live without but struggled to live with.ĭrawing on his long affair with his goddaughter Lady Catherine Walston (who refused to leave her husband because of her faith), 'The End of the Affair' is Greene at his most pared-down and intimate: he had never written in the first person before. He has had an affair with a married woman, Sarah Miles, which has left him bitter, desperate. The epigraph to Graham Greene's 'The Lawless Roads' is a magnificent quote from Cardinal Newman: "If there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity." Just as mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, it was the frictions of faith that brought Greene's novels to life. The novel follows Maurice Bendrix, a writer and Clapham resident. ![]()
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