Book Review 071 / The End of the Affair / Mr. Greene's Intense Art

The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

1951

Mr. Greene's Intense Art

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 71 / The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)

By GEORGE MAYBERRY
October 28, 1951

THE END OF THE AFFAIR By Graham Greene THE ART OF GRAHAM GREENE By Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris

t 47, Graham Greene is one of England's most important practicing novelists. He is also a prominent Roman Catholic layman. A convert in his middle-twenties, he has never become orthodox; it must come as a surprise to many readers encountering his books for the first time to discover that this adroit storyteller has involved himself and his audience with some of the more complex problems that arise from the clash of dogma and drama. His attempt to divide his many works of fiction into the categories of novels ("Brighton Rock," "The Power and the Glory" and "The Heart of the Matter") and entertainments ("The Ministry of Fear" and "The Third Man") has done little to enable one to separate the writer from his theology.

Whether designated as serious novels or entertainments, all his books, in varying degrees, reveal him as a philosophical novelist in the tradition, if not the stature, of Dostoevsky and Gide. Like Greene, they combined their powers as writers with an equally powerful view of the world under the domination of God. The intensity of their work is heightened by the fact that they are in warfare with faiths which alternately attract and repel them.

Before Greene, religion played a minor role in the English novel. Except for Mark Rutherford and the lesser novels of George Eliot, it has had its external manifestations in the country parsons of Fielding and Sterne, its whipping boys in Butler and Shaw, and stock characters in Jane Austen and Trollope. However, in its innermost forms it exists in the great tradition of poetry from Donne and Herbert to Eliot and Auden.

"The End of the Affair" is a moving first-person account of the warped liaison between a youngish English novelist and the wife of an up-and-coming civil servant. Greene's fatal attraction for melodrama and his equally fatal attraction for irony force the story-line to depend on the adulterer's attempt on behalf of the cuckolded husband to discover the lady's current favorite. After several suspects have been eliminated it turns out to be God.

Fortunately for those concerned with the meaning and form of Greene's work, Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris, two lecturers at Liverpool University, have written a long examination entitled "The Art of Graham Greene," in which they have had the aid of the master in elucidating his psycho-semantic refinements. Here we discover that, like two of his acknowledged tutors, Francois Mauriac and Ford Madox Ford, he is not so much a Catholic novelist as a "novelist who is a Catholic."

Since Greene is willing to dispose in this fashion of the theological aspect of his work, it seems fair enough or a secular critic to examine him as a novelist per se. "The End of the Affair" exhibits, possibly because his protagonist is a novelist possessing Greene's own sensibility and command of language, a verbal and intellectual comprehension of the tangible world. His cocktail-party chit-chat, his fumbling man-to-man conversations, his not-to-be-overheard mutterings between lovers are concrete and probably universal. As Mr. Allott and Miss Farris point out, when he condescends he can equal the slightly exaggerated realism of the best of the Dickensians. Equally, at the end of an almost boring passage at intellectual arms, he can draw you up short with an I. Compton-Burnett stab in the arras.

His most distinctive characteristic as a novelist, however, does depend on the use of his complicated religious belief. In "The Power and the Glory" his drunken adulterous past is set against an honest, intelligent, selfless revolutionary. In "Brighton Rock" the only really good character (in a nonreligious sense) is a woman of easy virtue. And in what is probably his best novel as novel, "The Heart of the Matter," the conflict of good and evil in the heart of his Major Scobie results in the triumph of evil. In "The End of the Affair" an old-fashioned rationalist is almost the only character presented sympathetically and without too much condescension.

His juxtapositions of love and hate, envy and admiration form the high level of his drama and are reinforced by the stylistic contrasts of the characters and scenes which give them flesh. When we come to his shifty money-changers, private investigators and race-track touts, Government officials and garden-party ladies we hear the tape recorder at its accurate work. In "The End of the Affair" the splendidly stupid private detective, Alfred Parkis, and his apprentice son, and the maudlin grifter who is the heroine's mother, equal the best of the seedy supernumeraries of his other novels. It is savage and sad, vulgar and ideal, coarse and refined, and a rather accurate image of an era of cunning and glory, of cowardice and heroism, of belief and unbelief.

Mr. Mayberry, well known as a critic in the field of modern fiction, is a former literary editor of The New Republic.

THE NEW YORK TIMES