The End of the Affair

I just finished listening to this again for the first time since right after it was released and there isn't anything that I really would change. This is one of the best books on Audible.

I picked it up again on a whim because I was tired of what I had been reading and I wanted to re-read this in print. But I started on audiobook intending to switch to print once I was done with the housework I was doing. I never got to the print. I will need to read it again in print at some point.

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My original thoughts on the first reading with spoilers: In The End of the Affair, Colin Firth reads the melancholy and beautifully haunting story of a couple having an affair at the end of World War II in London. This is a tragedy, and like all tragedies, nothing turns out the way you want it to.

What is it that forces us to read (or watch) tragedy? The romantic in me wants all marriages to be strong and healthy. But listening to The End of the Affair, I want Maurice and Sarah to stay together and at the same time I want Sarah to actually love her husband Henry. But we live in a broken and fallen world and tragedies communicate something very true.

The surprising turn for me in The End of the Affair is when suddenly in the middle the theme turns to God. (It is so very hard to describe the story without spoilers. But the book is now more than 60 years old and there have been two different movies made from it. So I will share some spoilers, but as few as I can.) Sarah and Maurice are making love during a air raid. It is the first of the V-2 rockets attacks. One of them lands near where they are and they are separated in the explosion. Sarah finds Maurice and fearing that he is dead, she prays for God to save him. Both Maurice and Sarah (and the husband Henry) are not religious. They are ‘above that type of superstition.'

That prayer was a turning point. Sarah leaves Maurice that day because she promised God that she would end the affair if Maurice was saved. Over the next two years they are apart. And Sarah is slowly finding God. One of the best lines of the book (this is from memory since I listened to the book) is from Sarah as she is sifting through the pain of being apart from Maurice, not loving Henry, still not sure about God. And she says, “I wish I knew another prayer than Me, Me, God Help Me.”

God does work through her. Eventually, Maurice prays another prayer, “I hate You. God, I hate You as though You existed.” And that is essentially the point. Greene's theme both in the marriage between Henry and Sarah and the affair between Sarah and Maurice and the relationship between God and the other characters is that if there can be hate, then there must be the ability for love. It is only the ambivalence that is truly dangerous.

The book unfolds as a first-person narrative by Maurice. But it is told through a number of flashbacks and at one point through Maurice reading Sarah's journal. It is slow and carefully paced. But the words are beautiful and the pain helps you cherish those you love. I guess that is the point of tragedy.