The End of the Affair

Bendrix

Maurice Bendrix is not a reliable narrator and knows it. He tells us this at the novel’s opening — that his account is saturated with hate, and that hate and love are not different in kind, only in object. He hated Sarah after she left him. He hated her husband Henry. He hated God, when God became relevant, most of all.

The affair with Sarah Miles was conducted under the V-1 bombs of the London Blitz. They made love in Bendrix’s flat on Clapham Common while the sirens ran. When a V-1 brought a section of the building down on Bendrix, Sarah made a bargain: if he lives, I will give him up. He lived. She kept the bargain. She did not tell him why.

The Diary

Bendrix hires a private detective to surveil Sarah, convinced she has a new lover. The detective returns with her diary. What the diary reveals is not infidelity but prayer — Sarah has been trying, awkwardly, urgently, and without institutional support, to become the Catholic that her bargain requires her to be.

Greene based the novel on his affair with Catherine Walston, a married American woman who converted to Catholicism and whom he loved for decades. The novel is dedicated to her. The End of the Affair is his most confessional work — the formal achievement is inseparable from the personal cost.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The End of the Affair apart: Bendrix’s jealousy-saturated narrative voice is one of the most honestly unpleasant and fully realised in 20th-century fiction; The theological argument — that Sarah’s bargain constitutes a real act of faith — is argued through character rather than doctrine; and The ending accumulates an emotional force that is genuinely unexpected given the novel’s bitter opening register. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The End of the Affair give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Jealousy is a form of love that has turned in on itself — it requires the beloved to be present even in absence. Faith, in Greene’s universe, is not a comfort but a compulsion — it arrives without invitation and demands everything. The bargain Sarah makes with God is the novel’s central act: a private transaction whose consequences radiate outward. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Why It Endures

The End of the Affair belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Graham Greene’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The Catholic framework is essential to the novel’s argument — readers resistant to religious ideas may find the conclusion unconvincing. The detective subplot, used to obtain Sarah’s diary, feels structurally awkward. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers interested in novels of passion and faith, and anyone drawn to the specific emotional register of wartime London.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Greene’s most emotionally exposed novel; the faith is real and so is the devastation.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Graham Greene
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene — Full Review
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene — Full Review

Greene’s Most Personal Novel

The End of the Affair was published in 1951. It is considered the most autobiographically shaped of Greene’s Catholic novels: the affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles corresponds to a real relationship between Greene and the wife of a civil servant, and the novel’s theological argument — about the nature of a bargain made with God in a moment of desperation — emerged from that specific experience. Sarah’s vow to God in the shelter during the bombing raid, and her subsequent struggle with the consequences of fulfilling it, is Greene’s most sustained examination of what it means to take religion seriously in the modern world.

The Neil Jordan Film

The novel was adapted by Neil Jordan in 1999, with Ralph Fiennes as Bendrix and Julianne Moore as Sarah. The film was well-received critically; Moore received a Golden Globe nomination. Jordan’s adaptation was particularly praised for its handling of the novel’s formal structure — the reversed chronology, the diary sections, the gradual revelation of what the affair actually was and what ended it — which translates to film less naturally than the surface story of love and jealousy. The earlier adaptation, a 1955 film directed by Edward Dmytryk with Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr, is now rarely revived.

The 1999 Film

Neil Jordan’s 1999 film adaptation, with Ralph Fiennes as Bendrix and Julianne Moore as Sarah, received strong reviews; Moore received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The film handled the novel’s theological dimension with more directness than Jordan’s usual atmospheric approach, and the explicit Catholic supernatural elements — Sarah’s apparent miraculous intercessions after her death — were retained intact rather than explained away.

Greene based Sarah Miles’s conversion partly on his own tortured religious experience; the novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1951 and is the work he most often identified as his best. A 1999 film adaptation directed by Neil Jordan, with Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes, received two Academy Award nominations including Best Actress.