Sarah and Maurice meet for energetic sex, but their conversation doesn't suggest the kind of idealism required by great love. It is the story of characters who desperately require more lightness and folly one can be grim in the confessional and yet be permitted a skip in the step on leaving the church. The film, on the other hand, is as hangdog as Stephen Rea's face in the first scene. The novel is a largely interior affair, existing inside Maurice's mind as he ponders again and again how a woman could seem so close and then suddenly be so far away. His adulterous husbands and sinning priests have to deal not only with built-in guilt but with the rules of the church, which they never believe in more than while breaking them. Now we are back up to the meeting of the two men in the rain.Īll of this makes an intriguing novel, and The End of the Affair is Greene dancing on the divide between the rules of religion and the lusts of the flesh. Sarah withdrew from Maurice, turned cold and unavailable, and eventually he retreated into a long bitterness. We see all of this in flashback, and how when the dust cleared and Maurice crept slowly back to consciousness, Sarah was on her knees in prayer.

The two fell instantly in love, and carried on a passionate affair until one day during their love-making, the earth literally shook, and it appeared that Maurice had been killed in a German raid. Henry was even then a sad sack with his attention always on his work. Maurice and Sarah met at a party just before the war, we learn. The new lover, if there is one, has made two cuckolds. But in Greene, and in this adaptation by Neil Jordan, it is all so much more worldly, weary and bittersweet than that, because Maurice feels he is being cheated on, too. The engine of the story could come from melodrama, or a thriller: A man unwittingly asks his wife's former lover for help in identifying her present lover. This story and milieu are from a 1951 novel by Graham Greene, said to be based on his own wartime love affair, and drenched with the Catholicism that was central to his work at that time.

The end of the affair book