Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951) is ahis most nakedly personal novel and, by many measures, the most theologically searching novel produced in twentieth-century England. Written in the shadow of Greene's own tumultuous love affair and his fitful relationship with Catholic faith, it transforms autobiographical material into a drama of divine pursuit so relentless it can only be described in terms borrowed from Francis Thompson's poem 'The Hound of Heaven' - a work Greene clearly had in mind when he structured the narrative.
The story is narrated by Maurice Bendrix, a novelist who resumes contact with his former lover Sarah Miles two years after she abruptly and inexplicably ended their affair during the London Blitz. Sarah is still married to the civil servant Henry Miles, and Bendrix, consumed by jealousy, hires a private detective to discover what ended the relationship. What the detective uncovers - Sarah's diary - reveals not a rival lover but a God. During a bombing raid in which Bendrix was buried under rubble and appeared to be dead, Sarah struck a bargain: if God would restore him to life, she would give him up. When Bendrix regained consciousness, she kept the promise she had made to a God she did not believe in.
The theological structure of the novel is built on two great biblical pillars. The first is Matthew 7:7 - 'Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find.' Sarah's prayer in the bombed flat is petitionary prayer at its most desperate and theologically naked: a prayer without prior faith, made on pure instinct to a God whose existence she doubted. That such a prayer could be answered - that the act of asking could itself be part of faith's beginning - drives the novel's implicit argument about how grace initiates itself. The second pillar is John 11:25, Christ's declaration to Martha: 'I am the resurrection and the life.' Sarah's movement after her vow is not toward conventional churchgoing but toward a gradual, reluctant recognition of a God who keeps pursuing her even through her resistance.
Psalm 139 runs as a structural motif through the narrative: 'Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?' Bendrix himself - bitter, anti-theistic, deeply wounded - is the novel's most interesting theological subject. He is the Hound of Heaven figure seen from the other side: a man who pursues Sarah with the same intensity that God pursues him, whose jealousy mirrors at the human level the divine jealousy that will not let go. His famous final words - '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 forever' - are among the most theologically dense endings in modern fiction. They are not a rejection of God so much as a recognition of God's reality coupled with a refusal to be loved, and Greene leaves the reader to judge whether even that refusal can forestall the divine pursuit.
Sarah's apparent miraculous intercessions after her death - the cure of Father Smythe's facial disfigurement, the healing of Bendrix's young friend Richard Parkis - push the novel into territory Greene handles with characteristic indirection: he neither confirms nor denies the miraculous, allowing the events to stand as testimony and as provocation. The reader, like Bendrix, must decide what to make of them.
Literary critics have noted the novel's debt to the detective genre - Bendrix the narrator is simultaneously detective and suspect, investigation and confessional - and to the structure of the Psalms, which move through complaint and accusation toward reluctant acknowledgment of divine sovereignty. Greene's prose is precise, ironic, and deeply uncomfortable, refusing the consolations of either simple faith or clean atheism.
The End of the Affair won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1951 and has never gone out of print. It has been filmed twice, most memorably in Neil Jordan's 1999 adaptation with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore. Its influence on subsequent Catholic literature - on Shusaku Endo, on Francois Mauriac, on the British Catholic literary tradition generally - has been substantial. More broadly, it demonstrated that serious theological reflection could inhabit a frankly sensual and morally complex narrative, and that grace could be the subject of literary art without requiring the art to become devotional.
The novel's debt to the Psalms is equally important. The structure of lament and praise, accusation and trust, that runs through the Psalter - particularly Psalms 22, 38, and 51 - maps onto Bendrix's inner journey with remarkable precision. He begins in the posture of the lamenter who accuses God of absence and injustice, moves through something like the dark night of the soul, and arrives not at comfortable resolution but at the kind of exhausted surrender that the Psalter calls trust. Greene understood that authentic faith almost always passes through the valley, and that the Psalms are the canonical record of that passage.
Green himself remained a complicated Catholic all his life - prone to doubt, unfaithful in his marriages, and deeply aware of the gap between belief and practice. But The End of the Affair suggests that he understood something about grace that more morally consistent writers sometimes miss: that God pursues precisely those who are least prepared to receive him, and that the scandal of such pursuit is not a theological anomaly but the central claim of the Gospel. The novel is Greene's most explicit exploration of that scandal, and it remains his most enduring achievement.