re:mote voices

Title: The End Of The Affair
Author: Graeme Greene
Publisher:Vintage

Bendrix is reminded of his affair with Sarah when he meets her husband one night in the pouring rain. Throughout the second world war Bendrix and Sarah had a relationship driven by the passion of desire and jealousy. Somehow despite the increasing fights, and attempts to hurt each other they stayed together. Until it ended, Sarah stopped talking to him, and that was that.

But the meeting with her civil servant husband two years after the fact brings it all back, and against his better judgement he invites the husband for a drink. Which is where the husband confesses his doubts about his wife, sparking a greater vein of jealousy in Bendrix. With the result that he follows up on one of the husband's comments, and hires a private detective to follow Sarah - an attempt to find out who she is with now, whether this was the man she left him for.

Told in 4 parts The End Of The Affair is a documentation of self confessed hate - Bendrix a published writer, recounting events, and the blistering darkness seething within him. With that the first part follows the meeting and the hire of the private detective. Then the second covers the initial discoveries of the private detective, mixed with Bendrix's memories of his relationship with Sarah. Leading to the theft of her diary and the same history only through her eyes. Bringing us to a resolution, which grinds past the obvious conclusion, which Bendrix himself acknowledges as an end and takes it to a more consequential point.

The End Of The Affair is driven by emotion. For the most part it is negative but those are often the strongest and most propelling. However as the book progresses the rage and hate provided by the isolation and jealousy are tempered by the warmer feelings, which created the whole situation. In the end there is a light that comes through from the narrative, but even then it is a curious one, which Graham Greene manages to use his the reader with just as much force, if not more, as the black emotion that launches The End Of The Affair.