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There his creator, Graham Greene, leaves him. The end of that affair, he implies, can only be the beginning of another. And this affair will have no end. Better to hate God, much better, says Greene, than not to know Him at all. For you can hate God only when you are in pain—and if you can stand the pain without drugs, it may turn into love.
"Difficult to Swallow." It would be a very hardened sinner who could read this love story without a pang of recognition, a momentary enlargement of the heart. But when, in the last 50 pages, the key changes from the familiar minor to an unfamiliar major—from the unmaking of a mistress to the making of a saint—even the warmest reader may feel his conviction cooling. For the machinery from which the rescuing God emerges is less the novelist's than the churchman's.
The End of the Affair, like all Graham Greene's novels, is loaded with buried questions, like mines. And the terms of his story are so studiedly, elaborately mundane that at first the unwary reader is hardly aware of the muffled explosions of the answers. (One of his buried questions : Must a woman who becomes a saint necessarily think of herself as "a bitch and a fake?" Greene's answer is yes.)
In this story, Greene apparently intended to show two things: 1) that saints are real human beings, who "happen" nowadays just as they always have and always will; 2) that no love affair, however sordid, can escape the terrible, endless implications of love. For some readers, he may have succeeded in demonstrating both; but for many his saint will seem as faraway and unreal as T. S. Eliot's Celia in The Cocktail Party.
English reviewers of The End of the Affair have applauded Greene's story telling (and one or two have called it his finest book), but most of them boggled over those last 50 pages. "Difficult to swallow," said London's Sunday Times. "Too openly schematic," said the critic of The Listener. Said the critic of the New Statesman and Nation: "This, it might seem, is the last book by Graham Greene which a nonspecialist [in religion] will be able to review."
Whether that jab is justified or not, this is a new departure for Graham-Greene —the first novel he has written in the first person. That fact signals a special effort, an attempt to go further than he has ever gone before. The first-person narrative is a tricky medium—especially when the person who tells the story is the somewhat seedy, not altogether admirable, Graham Greene type of "hero." And, as if that difficulty were not enough, Greene has added a second narrator: the book is divided between Bendrix' reminiscent story and Sarah's diary. Only
Greene's perfervid admirers will be completely satisfied with his handling of this double difficulty; but even his critics can admire his nerve and applaud his effort: for how else can you hope to hear the truth about human beings unless you overhear them talking to themselves?
The Unwritten Novel. There are the makings of half a dozen novels in Graham Greene's own life story. The first of them, chronologically, would be the story of a boy's growing up, a novel Greene has never written.