My copy of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is well read. The multicoloured underlines, notes, turned down pages are a testament to how much I love it. 

It’s a record of a love affair between Sarah, married to Henry, and novelist Bendrix. Set around Clapham Common in the forties, the threat of war hovers throughout.  It’s about writing, heartbreak, faith, forgiveness. A ‘novel of hate far more than of love.’

Greene captures the agony of loving like no other. In my battered copy I find this highlighted: ‘Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better.’ I must have been in love.

The prose is beautifully concise. Greene says things in three or four words that I could only hope to articulate in a page. He’s brutal too - Bendrix whispers, to a sleeping Sarah; ‘Henry won’t mind. He’ll find himself a new habit to take your place - perhaps he’ll collect Greek coins.’

It’s Bendrix’s story. That’s why the power of Sarah’s words - through her diary - hit the reader between the eyes. In the quote above, she’s railing at God.  Who is he to tell her that she can’t love Maurice Bendrix?

Is it a love story? A religious awakening, the destruction of three lives, a record of hate? A study of jealousy? I think it’s about what ifs, choices, and depending on your view, miracles.  It’ll make you think, grit your teeth with frustration, and perhaps cry.

William Faulkener said the book is ‘one of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language’. I’m not going to argue with that.