The End of the Affair

The novel focuses on Maurice Bendrix, a rising writer during World War II in London, and Sarah Miles, the wife of an important civil servant. Bendrix is loosely based on Greene himself, and he reflects often on the act of writing a novel. Sarah is based loosely on Greene's mistress at the time, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated. Bendrix and Sarah fall in love quickly, but he soon realizes that the affair will end as quickly as it began. He picks fights with her out of jealousy, but she remains patient. 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 nearly dies. After this, Sarah breaks off the affair with no explanation. Two years 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 she made a promise to God not to see Bendrix when she thought he was dead after the bombing. Greene describes Sarah's struggles with Catholicism, though it is an odd version of the faith, more like Jansenism. After her sudden death from pneumonia, several almost-miraculous events occur, though it is not clear what Greene expects the reader to think. By the last page of the novel, Bendrix has come to believe in a God as well, though not to love him. The End of the Affair is the fourth and last of Greene's explicitly Catholic novels.