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Love is in the air--or maybe anxiously repressed--in February and my romantic literature jag continues with The End of the Affair, the 1951 doomed romance by Graham Greene. This was my first exposure to Greene's fiction and while I was struck by the celebrated British author's intricate prose, keeping time like a Swiss clock, this novel is deficient in story, forgoing action for the reflections of its melancholy male narrator. These musings proceed from revealing to unceasing and finally, I just wanted The End of the Affair to end. The experience of reading this book was like listening to a 192-page voice mail message from an ex-boyfriend who hasn't moved on.

The story begins on "a wet black January night on the Common, in 1946" with our narrator, successful novelist Maurice Bendrix, signaling a fellow Londoner he recognizes in the rain. The man is Henry Miles, a civil servant whose contribution, as Bendrix sees it, is moving from assistant secretary in the Ministry of Pensions to assistant secretary in the Ministry of Home Security. Bendrix invites Henry for a drink out of morbid curiosity for news of Henry's wife Sarah, his ex-lover who Bendrix hasn't seen since June 1944 and never gotten over. Bendrix is full of barely repressed antipathy, both for Sarah and her pathetic husband, but as an author, is valued by Henry as a listener.

Unable or unwilling to consider that Bendrix's friendship with his wife might have developed into a love affair, Henry invites Bendrix to his home while Sarah is out for a walk. He confides that he's been deeply troubled by the fear that his wife might leave him. He shows Bendrix a letter in which a friend recommends a private detective. Bendrix offers to handle the transaction, musing "Jealous lovers are more respectable, less ridiculous than jealous husbands. They are supported by the weight of literature. Betrayed lovers are tragic, never comic." Henry burns the letter and tells Bendrix to forget it, but the writer has memorized the Vigo Street address of the private detective.

What an odd collection the trusted professions are. One trusts one's lawyer, one's doctor, one's priest, I suppose, if one is a Catholic, and now I added to the list one's private detective. Henry's idea of being scrutinized by the other clients was quite wrong. The office had two waiting-rooms, and I was admitted into one. It was curiously unlike what you would expect in Vigo Street--it had something of the musty air in the outer office of a solicitor's, combined with a voguish choice of reading matter in the waiting-room which was more like a dentist's--there were Harper's Bazaar and Life and a number of French fashion periodicals, and the man who showed me in was a little too attentive and well-dressed. He pulled me a chair to the fire and closed the door with great care. I felt like a patient and I suppose I was a patient, sick enough to try the famous shock treatment for jealousy.

After his interview with the private detective, Bendrix returns home and is notified by his landlady that he received a call from Mrs. Miles. Meeting for lunch, Bendrix compels Sarah to join him at Rules, their old restaurant. Sarah asks Bendrix to look her husband up occasionally, concerned he might be lonely. Bendrix manages to keep his bitterness under wraps, advising her to see a doctor for a cough he observes. He notices a man with a young boy in tow watching him and upon returning home, Bendrix is called on by this man, whose name is Parkis and has been assigned by the detective agency to report on Sarah's coming and goings.

Bendrix recalls being introduced to his beautiful and charming ex-lover by her husband, who he'd met at a party in the summer of 1944 and is curious to study for a future book. He invites Henry's wife to dinner for the purpose of picking her brain about her hapless civil servant husband. Walking Sarah down Maiden Lane to the tube station, Bendrix delivered a fumbling kiss without any expectation of going to bed with her. When the author invites Sarah to a screening of a movie based on one of his books, she comes without Henry. At dinner afterward, Maurice and Sarah fall in love over a bowl of onions.

Exempted from military service due to a bad leg, the war in Europe becomes a backdrop for Bendrix's obsession for Sarah, which proceeds through the air raids on London in June 1944. The lovers share little concern of their passion being exposed to Henry, but is tempered by their realization that ultimately, the affair will come to an end. Mr. Parkis determines that Sarah has been stealing away to an apartment at 16 Cedar Road. Bendrix learns that the tenant is a street preacher named Richard Smythe. Studying a diary which Parkis gets his hands on, Bendrix discovers Sarah is hardly carrying on an affair with Smythe, but seeking spiritual salvation.

He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt; only when he is there, with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.

If one could believe in God, would he fill the desert?

I have always wanted to be liked or admired. I feel a terrible insecurity if a man turns on me, if I lose a friend. I don't even want to lose a husband. I want everything, all the time, everywhere. I'm afraid of the desert. God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don't need admiration, they don't need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can't invent a belief.

Graham Greene writes with precision in the way he considers jealousy, with the corporeal and spiritual costs of a romance in which nothing is ever enough for one man. Even when playing out against atmospheric conditions like the rain and fog on a London winter, or an air raid with V1 rockets raining down on the city during one rendezvous, the novel's busiest activity takes place in the souls of the lovers. This approach might be most satisfying to those who enjoy introspective novels. One paragraph at a time, the writing is often jeweled, making up for an inherent lack of drama with language that dances across the page.

I am a jealous man--it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival--a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence and success he always enjoys.

Where The End of the Affair grows putrid for me is when soul searching like this ceases to serve as commentary on what the characters are doing and instead becomes all the characters are doing. This sums up most of the novel, unfortunately. Chapters started dragging for me as soon as Greene typed the word "God" and started going on explorations of human frailty in the Catholic sense, which seems more suited to a sermon than a novel. His characters are passionate and tormented, so the novel isn't lifeless necessarily, just tedious. The religious discussions made me feel like I was holding a chisel against my head and the author was hammering it.

The film industry has returned to Graham Greene for material for nearly as long as there's been a film industry and The End of the Affair has been adapted to film twice. In 1955, a U.K. production directed by Edward Dmytryk starred Deborah Kerr as Sarah Miles, Van Johnson as Bendrix and Peter Cushing as Henry Miles. In 1999, Columbia Pictures mounted a version adapted and directed by Neil Jordan featuring Ralph Fiennes as Bendrix, Julianne Moore as Sarah Miles and Stephen Rea as Henry Miles. Perhaps intending to appeal to the same audience The English Patient, I far prefer that film's embrace of an affair during wartime rather than religious screed.