A Bitch and a Fake: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Classic reread: 

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. 

This review is also available on my Substack here: 

a bookgeeks newsletter

 I don’t remember what the cover looked like either.
But feels like it could’ve been this one?

My Dad’s Books

We had all sorts of books in the house when I was growing up. I mean, I say that — but also, in retrospect, it feels like they were a very specific type of “all sorts”. Like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, a Mary Queen of Scots biography that I was scared of for unknown reasons… and, yes, Graham Greene. My Dad loved a good sinner to Catholicism story. He was a devout Catholic himself, he was orphaned as a youth; his mother died when he was 5, and father died when he was 11 (maybe? My memory fails me on his age, but, very young). As a youth, he hung out at the boxing ring and on the street, but slowly found mentors in Irish Catholic priests, who brought him around to another way (in part. haha!) to education and God. I think he saw himself in writers who wrote like sinners, as he saw himself, but loved God deeply, as he did.

In my late teens, I read the End of the Affair because I thought it would be racy and I was permitted to read it, unlike The Thorn Birds, which, when it was discovered I was reading it, was nearly confiscated, but I won the argument in the end; a point against censorship! 

I don’t remember almost anything about that first reading of The End of the Affair except a poignant feeling of loss. When I saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore (1999), I was confused, was this the book I read? I couldn’t connect this film version with the story I thought I had read.

As I wade through this intensely introspective phase of my life, I keep on thinking of books in my past, and I thought of this book again and decided to revisit and read it again. Not always the best idea! But let’s find out if it was. I can almost always find something good in any book which is sometimes annoying to my book friends (you know who you are), but we’ll see if this is the case here.

Old Sexist Writers of their Time

I sometimes forget that most male writers of that era (WWII) were stuck in the world they lived in and not had evolved to see beyond the gender roles or intensely patriarchal systems of the time. Sure women could be intelligent, learned even, have jobs - things like that, but they still were put away in their little boxes and treated with a kind of unnamed disdain. Like, how dare they have sexual lives and powerful personalities that outshine your own (- a man)! Graham Greene was no exception to this, the general rule. But what I am trying to work out is if maybe he knew this, even in the back of his mind, as he wrote.

His writing of Bendrix for instance was so hard for me to read this time around. Maurice Bendrix, my guts hate him so much. But I know why Sarah falls in love with him. He’s everything her husband Henry is not: passionate, sullen, unrepentant, and then angry and remorseful. And in the scornful language he uses to speak of Sarah, he is a caricature of an angry man who hasn’t gotten what he wanted - the girl. It’s always clear he loves Sarah very much, but it’s annoying to observe his childish unevolved emotions.

Ugh - Religion

But - back to religion, which somehow I had, in my selective 18-year-old-way, forgotten that this book was actually about. Faith. When we begin the story we are getting it from Bendrix and he is staunchly areligious, but still casually dropping religion here are there as if to point out God’s importance:

Hate seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have have been able to say from their actions whether it was the jealous Judas or cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Bendrix also believes Sarah is as agnostic as he is,

We had agreed so happily to eliminate God from our world.

Even as he notices that God has crept into Sarah’s thinking, People go on loving God, don’t they all their lives without seeing Him?, she says, on the day of the end of their affair, he still is disconnected from the depth of her feeling.

In Book 3, we find out that Sarah has been holding so much more faith in God than Bendrix, or Henry, could ever have imagined. Bendrix had hired a PI, the irreplaceable Mr. Parkis, at first as a thinly veiled kindness to Henry, and then to feed his own jealousy. The hiring and subsequent information he is fed through Parkis, emboldens Bendrix to read Sarah’s diary after Parkis steals it. This is where we see that Sarah’s faith in God is so steadfast and that the reason she ended the affair is because she made a pact with Him in Bendrix’ apartment when they were bombed during the V-1s in London in 1944. They had not taken cover but the building was damaged and Bendrix got up to check on the damage, leaving Sarah to worry and wait, after begging him not to go. And when he did not return she could not wait any longer and went to go find him. There under the front door on the floor was Bendrix, still and immobile. Sarah was sure he was dead, and indeed even touched his cold lifeless hand, and then she went back to his apartment and got down on her knees to make a deal.

She is not alone to have made such a pact! Who hasn’t prayed for things in a mindless vain way and promised God something in return? I have, but only as a child, my faith long having since gone astray. I feel certain my father was very familiar with these contracts we make with God in our achingly human way, powerless and desperate. But who keeps their pacts with God? My guess is only those who truly believe.

Most of the novel is a slow unveiling of why the affair really ended and a reveal of Sarah’s inner conflicted life through her diaries. Truly, she is the only character in the novel who behaves well and follows the strength of her convictions. This is why I suspect that Greene, using the template of the era he is living in, is actually exposing the limited thinking of the patriarchal systems that women had to live in.

A Slut in her own Mind

Even the character of the righteous Father Crompton insists to Henry and Maurice that Sarah was a good person, and a faithful one: Mr Miles, I don’t think you realize what a good woman your wife was. He is trying to convince them to have a Catholic funeral because he believes that’s what she wanted. But they don’t want to do it, and say it’s unreasonable.Especially Bendrix, who manages to railroad Henry into thinking Sarah was just delirious in her last moments (oh yeah, spoiler alert: she’s so good she has to die).

Sarah does not think she is good, she thinks she is a phoney and a fake and in the end says so in a letter to Maurice. But to herself in her diary, she is even more critical calling herself a slut for her failed seduction attempts after breaking it off with Maurice and a bitch and a fake to God when she talks to Him in her diary, asking Him:

…in this bitch and fake where do you find anything to love?

She is so convinced that there is nothing in her that she doesn’t even try to save herself in the end. Her inattentiveness to her self kills her: A cold, then likely pneumonia, then dead.

The difference is the language is crucial to me. That she can’t bear to use a coarse word like bitch in her letter to Maurice just shows me that she cares so much how he sees her and does not want that to change. This is where I have have a glimmer of hope for Greene, he chose this plot and these characters for a reason and making Sarah the person with the most faith who, however miserably, stays true to her word shows his awareness of the confines women lived in during this era, by elevating Sarah (a fallen woman) to the highest moral standard.

Not Terrible!

So, I guess despite the slow bitter narrative by Maurice Bendrix, I did like this reading I had of The End of the Affair. It’s a quiet novel, it might bug your modern sensibilities like it did mine, but Graham Greene is an interesting person and writer and sometimes it’s worth it to go back and remember how we got to where we are now, in literature and life.

Was this a reread a good idea: Unexpectedly, yes

Favourite character: Mr. Parkis, what a gem.

Least favourite character: Failed cult leader and evangelical atheist, Richard - who I didn’t bring up because he’s even more annoying to me than Bendrix, which is saying A LOT. I mean, who gives up their whole “raison d’être” just because you meet someone who has a stronger sense of conviction than you do? A weak, weak person, that’s who. Oh AND you have to fall in love with them? Please! Anyway, annoying but serves a kind of purpose in the plot.

Favourite plot point: Sarah’s childhood books and copy of The Children of the New Forest by Andrew Lang

Least favourite plot point: Sarah’s miracle, unmentioned here for similar reasons to “Least favourite character“. 

Reading glasses rating of of 5: 👓👓👓 and a half

Dark, hilarious, challenging. Consider yourself warned.

Bina by Anakana Schofield

Rating 👓 👓 👓 👓 👓

This, like the subtitle says, is a novel in warnings - and these warnings should be heeded.

Bina is a woman with a mission to warn you. She has made mistakes that harmed her and she doesn’t want you harmed too. 

Bina, a 74 year old Irish woman, belongs to a secret Group who help people die. She is funny and selfless and a much better person than she thinks she is. Simultaneously mistrustful and generous to strangers, she would be the first to admit it’s a problematic paradox - look at Eddie, a free-loader and parasite - not really Bina’s son - but how else to explain him? And Phil, her best friend in the world, leaving forever without letting Bina say the things she wanted say. But Eddie might come back, and so, in fear and exhaustion, Bina takes to her bed to write down (because her memory is not always great) her warnings to the world. In the yard a group of young activists protest and a court case against Bina looms.

Anakana Schofield brings us Bina in a time where we need guidance and simple morality, and honestly, who better than a woman who has had enough?