The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is one of those books that has been recommended to me millions of times. 'It'll be one of the best books you'll ever read,' people kept saying.

In so many ways, it looked to be the perfect book for me. A bit of romance, the background of the Blitz in 1940s London and a split narrative. Unfortunately, I didn't fall quite in love with it.

I think I have to admit here, though, that for various reasons this tiny book took me three weeks to read and I really can't blame that on Graham. I also had all the expectations set up by said annoying people above. And I will try and blame them. Perhaps they only loved it because it's 200 pages and so it was one of the only books everyone managed to finish... Ok, becoming a little bitchy now. That aside, I guess it came down to just not loving the characters entirely. In the first few chapters Maurice just seemed to be a right drip who had fallen for a someone who really wasn't very nice. So why would I care whether or not they got together?

Saying that, this book initiated one of those lovely situations when the book club makes me think a bit harder. It got me past my frustration with taking so long to read it and made me realise how intricate this novel was, despite it being short. It asked all the big questions about love, religion, war... and I loved that. This is something Greene addressed in his literary criticism, where he condemned the characters of modernists like Virginia Woolf and EM Forster for "wander[ing] about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin" as the writers lacked any religious sense.

There is, therefore, something in this book for everyone. For me, I may not have been swept up by the characters as other might have been, but I enjoyed seeing how groups of people come together, affect one another, misunderstand each other and all, ultimately, face these big questions and ideas.

There are some weird random threads that run parallel to the main narrative, but they probably all provide some extra nugget, even if I haven't quite worked out what, why or how just yet. With that in mind, I think this book would have been a perfect novel to study. Plenty to look out for and all those wonderful themes and imagery that examiners jump up in the air and do a little happy dance about.

All in all, the book got 7/10 from the book club and 6.5/10 from me.