“The End of the Affair”

One could be forgiven for assuming that this was yet another postmodern ode to lasciviousness, but it turns out that couldn't be farther from the truth. What emerges from the fraught love triangle (rhombus?) at the center of this narrative is a meditation on the nature of love, and what human passion, desire, and devotion tell us about God. We find characters tumbling into belief in God, some led there by hatred and grief (“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist”), others by lust and amorousness, still others by epiphany and grace. It is the insufficiency and impotence of human 'love' that haunts this novel: the inability of passionate desire to bring about the ends that it craves. 

There is no proselytizing or whitewashing here. The characters are vibrant and complex, and Greene refuses to let us look away as they come to grips with the ground and end of their hopes and desires, and the gravity of the promises they have made. 

One rather interesting element is how the moral demands of Catholicism (i.e., the prohibition against divorce) lead certain characters to wrestle with existential questions that they would otherwise have happily ignored indefinitely. In an age when such objective morality is much maligned, this story invites us to consider whether such strictures may, in fact, be profound graces, forcing us to face the void of nihilism honestly, to take stock of what we truly believe about the world—rather than what is simply most convenient day-to-day—and how we ought to live if we are to become the people we wish to be. 

This book is particularly worth reading for those who have been conditioned to see relationships in terms of ownership and tend to manifest love as jealousy. Even marriage is not ownership, and if a little passion can go a long way, it does not take much jealousy to strangle the object of one's affections: “Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.” There is much practical wisdom, not to mention theological insight, to be gleaned from these pages, and it is well worth the read.