The End of the Affair exhumes a febrile wartime love affair between Maurice Bendrix, author, and Sarah Miles, wife of civil servant in the Home Security ministry Henry Miles. The affair is revisited retrospectively from Bendrix’s perspective, filtered through his authorly lens, hazy with self-righteousness, foggy with jealousy and thwarted passion–and then we get to visit it in real time via Sarah’s diary, which slices through Bendrix’s craft and self-centredness and desire and pretension with a steel blade forged in the fires of the Blitz and the vortex of God. And suddenly both the idea of the affair and the idea of ending itself are questioned, reframed, and plunged into doubt. Much like Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (1952), also about transgressive desire, it’s written like a noir detective story–indeed, it does feature a rather hapless detective–everything is uncertain and unstable and the narrator is not a good man, as such.
Bendrix is the kind of man who in public will tell his former lover that
“Of course I’m joking, We had a good time together; we’re adults, we knew it had to end some time. Now, you see, we can meet like friends and talk about Henry.”
…
I wished I had been able to whistle a tune, something jaunty, adventurous, happy, but I have no ear for music. (p. 33)
and two pages later, write privately in his memoir that
“I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy – I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. (p. 35)
It’s an odd little book–nearly 200 pages–and I don’t want to say too much about the plot; everything is bleak, and it rains a lot, and there is uncertainty and danger and the constant adrenaline hum of wartime. It’s very English in its way, with its seemingly taciturn men, and its pubs, and the Common (an enclosed stretch of heathland/grazing land within the city of London–perhaps an ironic nod to the stormy passions of Wuthering Heights) that separates the Miles’s home from Bendrix’s flat. I first read this ages ago, after I saw the film (Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, dir. Neil Jordan, 1999). I thought I understood some of its bitterness in the throes of the angst of my early adulthood; it sure does hit different now.
If you like Fleabag, or Elizabeth Bowen, you might like this.
Title quote from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’.