Went in expecting a romantic drama, came out with a vaguely horrifying story about belief which is in someway beyond will. No wonder it’s taken me a full 24 hrs to pluck up the courage to write this review.

Because, the fact is, I don’t quite get this book. I get bits of it, I can make out hazy presence of a whole, but I can’t quite bring it together; it’s so dense with ideas. Love and hate and jealousy, all ever shifting and all never quite what I or the characters thought. This is one of those books that, when I finished it, made me want to go dedicate several hours to JSTOR. 

I haven’t done that yet, but I did read a quick review (from The Guardian’s 100 best novel’s list) that basically was like: good as a depiction of a doomed romance, poorly aged as a Catholic novel. Which seems like a terrible take to me, not least because it was immediately followed by this anecdote

Which I’m partly including because it’s funny, but also because God is so central to the book. Another summary (this one from my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die book: this is clearly a worthy text) referred to Him as ‘the third man’. He definitely lurks around all the novel’s corners.

And for me, it only really became total when it began grappling with the metaphysical. Affair melodramas are not a new genre, and that’s what the first chunk of the novel is. I found the narrator’s voice compelling from the start — the unsteady hypocrisy of it all, the fact he is clearly misrepresenting things, and it remains to see how, exactly — but the way Sarah’s diary entries changed everything was really, honestly thrilling. An affair littered with biblical miracles (perhaps) is new to me, and it honestly added a frisson of terror. 

There’s something scary about its series of conversions, seemingly happening despite the characters’ wishes. The fact they change everything but improve little. The fact God becomes another person to owe and appease and love/hate/envy (the holy trinity of this novel’s emotions). I was unshakeably reminded of Ted Chiang’s short story Hell Is The Absence Of God, in which God is real and known and seen in actions, but not implicitly loved. The story ends with a character essentially forced by a miracle to love God, and then be doomed to Hell anyway, where God isn’t. There’s definitely some resonance there, but the particular reason I bring it up is because I find that story deeply creepy. There’s a horror to it, to being able to be changed so fundamentally by someone that you become someone contrary to who you were before. And yet, I suppose, isn’t that life. Anyway, it v much informed my reading of The End of the Affair, which I found a frequently chilling. That moment when Hes and Yous start slipping into Bendrix’s speech without him seeming to notice, without him seeming to have moved on from his rejection of God, has something in common with possession narratives. At least, to me. Because that’s the thing, Greene was a Catholic and he did believe, and presumably believed with some affection. I genuinely don’t know how negatively this is supposed to be read, if at all. How much of this is me bringing my own reading, my own post-Exorcist understanding of Catholicism as somehow horror? How much is this stopping me getting the book? Am I blinded, misreading what’s clearly on the page through my own biases like Bendrix going through Sarah’s journal?

The other writer I was reminded of was Muriel Spark. In the beginning, this was through The Girls of Slender Means, which is set in the same post-but-not-really war London, under the same shadows, between the same ruins. But then, of course, came the Catholicism, which is deeply influential in Spark’s work — she converted later in life, and many of her novels feature converts too, including her most famous. The main character of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sandy, becomes a nun, after finding Catholicism through — can you believe — a left-behind love affair. The affair is a very different, well, affair, as is Sandy’s conversion, but there’s clearly something happening in the mid-20th century between illicit love and endings and God. 

There’s this concept in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, ‘the transfiguration of the commonplace’, which I’ve found useful in beginning to puzzle out The End of the Affair. After all, that’s what God does in this book. Ordinary things — reading a children’s book, meeting a mother, getting a cold, waking up from unconsciousness — gain meaning and resonance when brought into the context of miracles (a consciously unsaid phrase). But it’s also what the affair does. The knowledge it may be temporary, the jealousy that engenders, renders Sarah’s most ordinary actions signs of great betrayal to Bendrix. Going for a walk, visiting a friend become transfigured into signs. The affair, the love without security, transfigures the world. And what is loving God if not loving without security, loving with hope? The commonplace is transfigured, perhaps literally, perhaps not, into proof for belief. They are not analogous processes — in someway, they’re acting in opposite directions — but that’s all I’ve got right now.

I also like the Spark comparison because it brings the book into dialogue with Scottish religion and literature, which is deeply marked by Calvinism. There is something very Calvinist, very pre-determined in all this. Sarah’s mother’s baptism, the early clarification that she will [uh spoilers if you’ve somehow read this far without reading the book] die, even the hopeless name of the novel sets this path up. You will, says God (or Greene, but in the world of the novel, what’s the difference?), end up where you end up. Which, I think, brings us back to the horror of it all. There’s a lack of free will that’s terrifying. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the earliest example of (something which can be described as) Christian horror I’ve encountered is The Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner, which operates very much in this Calvinist context.

This is, of course, barely scraping the surface. I think there’s something really fascinating going on with emotions particularly, which is at once really nuanced and totally chartable. Are hate and love synonyms, as it sometimes seems? What is felt towards who when? Actually, while we’re asking questions, when is this novel being written? Three years after its events is mentioned at one point, but it also feels totally in the moment, the way Bendrix’s feelings change. This is such a slim book but it’s so packed with nuance and contradiction. I need to get googling. It’s not just that I want to read some research on it: I legitimately want to write an essay on it, to plot out my thoughts. Respond. And, like, whoops, seems like I’ve already made a good start.