Early on, he seems happy with Sarah: “She touched me sympathetically with her hand and from then on we sat there with our hands in the innocent embrace that children and lovers use.”īut then the bomb falls, and for a few minutes, there is no Bendrix. Part of it is Bendrix himself, a man who says such things as “If I could, I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man.” We get nothing of the Bendrix before the war, before Sarah, but it seems that the anger stems from her departure, from the hole the bomb left in the middle of his life without even having the courtesy to kill him. But the story doesn’t begin there, but only later, long after the affair has passed, when suddenly Sarah and Henry once again become part of Bendrix’s life and he tries to piece everything together, to find out why Sarah left him, what precipitated that end.īut the story, as startling as it is when we discover what happened, is only part of this book. But he chooses to tell the story of the end of the affair, of the love that he had for Sarah Miles, of the passionate affair that commenced, throughout the war, until the day, when the V-1 came crashing down, nearly killing Bendrix and definitively killing their affair. It doesn’t start out that way of course, for love never does. Perhaps there is no one he hates more than himself. In the end, it not just God or his lover, Sarah, or her sad-sap husband, Henry that Bendrix has come to hate. In the very first page he warned us “this is a record of hate far more than of love.” In the end, it is very much a record of hate, a book as full of anger and pain as anything not written by Philip Roth. The Novel: “I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed,” Maurice Bendrix says at the conclusion of the novel.

Edward Dmytryk), 1999 (**** – #3 of the year, dir. Last Line: “I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”.First Line: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”.Pages: 192 (Penguin 20th Century Classics).

Graham Greene’s record of hate: The End of the Affair (1951)

The end of the affair by graham greene