The brilliance shines in philosophical and psychological insights (e.g., 'The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than happiness'). If it sounds unpleasant, it is, but it is also brilliant and funny and moving. It also made me wonder how much of it is autobiographical (apparently Greene based the character of Sarah on the woman with whom he had an affair and to whom he dedicated his novel). It's not easy for Maurice to revisit the past: “If this book of mine fails to take a straight course it is because I am lost in a strange region.' Throughout his account (his confession!), Maurice's honesty about the affair, about his self-centered love, jealousy, and hatred, and about his dislike of God, is so appalling that reading Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair (1951) felt like watching a man flay himself in public.

As Maurice tells us, 'How twisted we humans are.' (Maurice makes plenty of similarly bleak comments, like “Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent?”) 'Then the demon spoke,' however, and Maurice offered to visit the detective for Henry, initiating a tragic chain of events. On that rainy night, Henry ended up inviting Maurice home because he wanted to confide in him: suspecting Sarah of having an affair, he'd contacted a detective agency to investigate her but would like Maurice to laugh at him for being a fool so he can burn the agency's letter and forget his suspicions. Had God or the devil moved him? He had had no contact with the couple ever since the affair ended over a year and a half ago, and he was unsure whom he hated more, Sarah or Henry, who'd remained obtusely innocent of the affair. Beginning his account of an affair he had with Sarah Miles during WWII, he says, 'this is a record of hate far more than of love.' He then recounts recently seeing Sarah's civil-servant husband Henry at night standing in the rain without an umbrella and, instead of passing by unseen, addressing him. Maurice Bendrix is a moderately successful novelist-films are made from his books, and he is 'praised for his technical ability'-but he earns little money from his writing and calls himself a scribbler. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?' Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions.

'I would have liked to have left that past time alone, for as I write of 1939 I feel all my hatred returning.

The end of the affair by graham greene