The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Graham Greene's 1951 novel The End of the Affair tells the story of Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Mills. Bendrix is searching for love, but only finds an unresolved love/hate with Sarah, a married woman whom he can never have because she will not leave her husband Henry. Sarah is also searching for love, and finds her way back to Christianity and the Roman Catholic faith of her mother and her own childhood.

The book turns when Sarah is shocked back into belief by the miracle of answered prayer. Bendrix lies lifeless under the wreckage of an exploded German V1 bomb. In book III, chapter II, her diary records her prayer when she sees his body, "Dear God, I said - why dear, why dear? - make be believe. I can't believe. Make me. I said, I'm a bitch and a fake and I hate myself. I can't do anything of myself. Make me believe" and then "Let him be alive, and I will believe." Moments later Bendrix gets up and she knows that she must leave him and return to God.

Her faith is simple but fierce. She is vulnerable to superstition, but is also able to resist Bendrix's pursuit of her. Her death is hastened by exposing herself to the cold rain in a desperate attempt to pray in church.

In the last chapter, Richard Smythe, an outspoken atheist whom Sarah meets following her affair with Bendrix, experiences a type of conversion through the miraculous healing of his disfigured cheek. Sarah's belief was indirectly strengthened by listening to his arguments against God, and this foreshadows what is about to happen with Bendrix on the next page.

Bendrix realizes his hatred of Sarah reveals his hatred of God. He hates or rather fears the fact that anyone, even Sarah, can leap from immorality and unbelief directly to sainthood. In the final chapter he rants, "What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, then it's not so difficult to be a saint." Bendrix is rejecting grace: that God loves and saves sinners, that a Christian does not stand before God in his own righteous but only in the righteousness of Christ, purchased on the cross, received by faith alone and not by works.

Yet even his hatred of God reveals a nascent belief. He concludes his rant with, "I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed." And the book ends with utter loneliness: "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."

But like Richard Smythe, Bendrix indirectly argues for belief. One cannot finish the story, after being captivated by Greene's characters and plot, and side with Bendrix. He have to hope that we don't end up like him, which means we have to hope in God.