The Rising Asia Literary Circle met at The Bhawanipur House café for its monthly book discussion and with utmost honesty the members discussed British novelist Graham Greene’s highly discomfiting and complex The End of the Affair (1951). While one member detested reading it, another member confessed of going back to the book again. The full house, along with Andrew Fleming, British deputy high commissioner, listened in and even shared their inputs on the author and the book that deals with illicit love and religious duplicity.
Opening the floor, Julie Banerjee Mehta, the curator and anchor of the Rising Asia Literary Circle, said: “I selected this novel, set in London during the Second World War, because it resonates with world affairs today, and how love becomes a chimeral goal that brings to the fore the greed and fissures in our need to possess and be brutal.” Throwing more light on the protagonists, Julie added: “Maurice Bendrix is based on Greene himself, and he often reflects on the act of writing a novel. Sarah is based on Greene’s lover, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated. Maurice and Sarah, a married woman, fall in love quickly, as each tries to find salvation by fighting their demons, and attempting to make friends with God in a transactional way.”
Harish Mehta, who taught Greene in his history courses at McMaster University, compared the love triangles in two of Greene’s novels — The Quiet American and The End of the Affair. In both novels, war is a character, and deals with bureaucracies — American imperialist diplomats in Quiet American and British officials in The End of Affair. Harish said: “I found the character of the jealous lover, Maurice, in Affair to be an Othello, pathologically suspicious of the woman who loves him and whom he destroys.” In zest, adding his touch of humour, he also talked about the ‘transactional love’ aspect of the book and shared a personal anecdote when the vow of not eating steak was taken in exchange for landing safely. This had the house in splits.
Taking up from Harish, professor Chaitali Maitra said, “The End of the Affair is a unique story about a ‘moderately’ successful author who looks at ‘time’ which creates many-layered perspectives, smearing his love-hate relationship with his lover, Sarah, a married woman. Sarah’s atheist mind, ‘learns’ to believe in God when she asks for Maurice’s life, even at the cost of distancing herself from Maurice; eventually, both develop their respective, but different relationships with God.”
Anju Munshi talked about the sad undertone of the book. She said: “There is a sad and corrupt psychology that runs like an undercurrent through the novel. And it points to Maurice’s disturbed mind. He is like an angry mafia boss while Sarah is like a gentle cool breeze who offers relief. In Greene’s deft hands, each character has their personal demons and failings, making them relatable to the reader across histories and geographies.”
Zilka Joseph, an Indian-born Jewish American poet from Ann Arbor, USA, said: “Greene’s novel is brilliant. It’s a compelling study of hate, love, conflict, desperation and self-inflicted torment, all playing out in the backdrop of war. Only a master craftsman with extraordinary skill could create so many intricate layers, build such complex characters, give us deeply troubling arguments, and evoke so many emotions in the reader.”
Professor Swati Mukerji drew attention to the final line of the novel — ‘Leave me alone forever’. “It encapsulates Bendrix’s emotional exhaustion and the desire to escape the pain and complexities of love and faith. Even though he expresses his hatred towards the world, he finally acknowledges God’s existence and prepares himself to embark on a spiritual journey.”
Post-graduate student Subhay Chatterjee talked about the fractured impulse of 20th-century Europe. Rising Asia’s regular reader, Anasuya Pal, threw more light on the character of Sarah, “While Sarah is depicted as an unblemished, helpless femme fatale, she was, in fact, using her charms to have her cake and eat it too, by using Maurice for sexual gratification while staying on in her marriage to the civil servant, Henry. Sarah would choose to leave Henry for him, and confused her sexual intimacy with him as an expression of love for him.”
Short-story writer Barnali Roy added, “Greene’s narrator gives away enough of his unlikable traits to make the reader despise him. You can see through Maurice, yet you can’t fully give up on him. The insignificance of the human entity in the face of the larger forces of faith, hatred, passion, and war, is highlighted. Sarah is hardly the victim; she manipulates the three men quite often. She resorts to God as a kind of last measure against her own weaknesses.”
What impressed Nishi Pulugurtha, a professor, about Greene’s novel is the fact that the protagonist Maurice Bendrix is a novelist who is looking for material to write on. Pitching in, short-story writer Madhulika Khaitan added: “A daringly honest, relentless exposition of layer after ugly layer of possession and jealousy, forcing the reader to confront dark shades within their inner selves. Despite his apparent ugliness, the ending leaves the protagonist at his most vulnerable — crumbling, begging to allow himself the acknowledgement of a better love, the pain of unreachable places as his only reality.”
Critical reader Promita Banerjee Nag concluded the session with her brutal words: “The novel offers insights into the writing process of a novelist, Maurice. The task of doing ‘my daily five hundred words’, the frustration of being ‘betrayed by his own technique’ while shaping his fictitious characters, and the need ‘to amass trivial material’ till he reaches ‘the real subject’, emphasise the mundaneness of writing as opposed to the grandness and ingenuity, which is associated with it.”
