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Love aside, most of the great romantic novels of the 20th century also includes a fair share of both pain and hate, and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is certainly one of them. I'd say, it's one of the most honest and endearing explorations of love (and adultery) I have read in a long time, and one reason why it works so well is that is does everything so much more openly than similar type novels. But I found it's not without it's faults, albeit only small niggles, as Greene employs a mix of flashback, stream-of consciousness and conventional narrative, partly based on diary entries. Greene takes the basic conventions of romantic fiction but he also goes about transcending genre, which pushed this up into a different class from your bog-standard love story.

Set in London during the blitz the novel is centred around a sort of anti-hero, the jealous, calculating and malicious Maurice Bendrix, a second-rank novelist, who makes the acquaintance of his neighbour’s wife, Sarah, and of course they fall in love. But it is an affair tortured by his envy towards the husband Henry, and her overwhelming guilt, and after Bendrix is nearly killed by a bomb blast, her involvement in extramarital activity with him becomes too much to bear. After a couple of years pass, Henry, who is ignorant of the affair, approaches Maurice about his wife’s infidelity with another man, and the intrigue of the narrative is heightened when a private detective starts to investigate.

I had already seen the Ralph Fiennes / Julianne Moore film adaptation, which was pretty good, but the novel is far superior, as Greene, who was arguably at his peak when he wrote this, goes to greater depths to enlarge the reader's understanding of love and it's various subdivisions, of which most get explored. I found myself going up and down like a yo-yo when it came to how I felt towards the three main characters, myself being torn by the love/hate interplay between them. With this being a meticulously British novel, it comes as no surprise we get the rain lashing down, but through the dreary weather, pain and unpleasantness, the novel for me will be remembered for the brief moments of pure love and passion.