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Every now and then I will run into a book that is universally lauded only to find it underwhelming to the extreme. End of the Affair was such a book.

There is a combination of elements that I find very difficult to abide, from a supremely selfish and privileged narrator who seethes in misogyny, to the main target of said misogyny, the woman who is depicted as a clunky virgin/whore composite without forgetting what underpins all this, a weird idea of faith and perhaps the most pathetic 'miracles' I have encountered outside of Pure Flix.

If there was ever an example of how Christianity in the West was already a dying creature, slowly dragging its moribund carcass over a mental landscape ever so wounded and irrevocably altered by absolutely destructive wars, End of the Affair would be it. The title can be read as Europe's End of the Affair with God: been there, done that, too weary now.

I fully admit my bias, I am an atheist and as such all this Catholic silliness is, as far as I know, precisely that, silliness. But I am capable of enjoying works of fiction that are deeply steeped in faith; Paradise Lost changed my life and to this day I turn to it for comfort (and yes, that means I have to reconcile the also very heavy of misogyny there but that is a tale for another day). What makes End of the Affair so unconvincing is the level of self-consciousness. It is a fumbling for divinity painfully delivered onto an already secular world. At almost every turn one senses that the author is embarrassed of the flights of godly fancy and as such the miracles are so scaled down as to become absolutely ridiculous.

Generations before, George Eliot's characters can go into long religious discussions that may very well leave the reader bored but that are very much concerns those characters hold very dear. End of the Affair tries to conciliate the modernity that cannot help but inform so much of its narrative thrust, if only in terms of technique, with extremely old fashioned notions. The result is a mismatch that is ill resolved, like a little girl putting on her grandmother's clothes and snickering to herself in the mirror as she twirls around even as she tries to convince everyone else that granny's crinoline is ever so beautiful. It might have been beautiful when grandmother was waltzing about in a Victorian ball room but it is dead, dead, dead after Flanders and deader than dead after the death camps.

On that subject, the Wars and how they interact with this God, one is left wondering just where this personage was during Auschwitz. (view spoiler)[Surely, if God can intervene to save the narrator's life, healing a blotched cheek and perhaps a child's upset stomach, then He very well have, I don't know, stopped millions from dying horribly? In fact, God did not even bother with the victims close to the narrator's home as several died in the Blitz. Mysterious ways and all that. (hide spoiler)]

There is also a caricature of an atheist that is so vile and revolting that it feels very much like a personal attack. Ironically, though, the atheist actually raises very important questions that remain entirely unanswered. Jingly keys syndrome as others have coined it, this tendency of not addressing issues people do have with ideas of God but instead distracting them with other issues no-one cares about or even worse via 'what about-thism', infects even 'high' Christian fiction. I am used to finding it in the garbled productions of David R. White and Kurt Cameron but it is deeply disappointing to see that no matter how 'refined' a writer may be, the moment they adopt very poor epistemology, they are on their way to create a dud.

Speaking of duds, perhaps the worst offender of them all is the way in which women are presented.
Few times have I encountered such a textbook depiction of woman as virgin/whore, to the point it could be a textbook demonstration of how not to write a female character. (view spoiler)[And of course she has to die. How else is she to expiate her sins? (hide spoiler)]
Since God is a dude, she is also a crystallization of how to fail the Bechdel test as all she does is ramble about the narrator and/or ramble about God. It is about the most forced conflict ever as, in essence, the narrator is actually very much like the biblical God: petty, cruel, selfish, with a profound distrust for women in general and an extra veneer of bile aimed at his 'loved' one in particular.

I do not mind flawed narrators. But flawed narrators all angry that their girl left them for God are not just flawed, they are silly and unintentionally so.

In fact, the entire book is silly. A character that is presented as silly, though; the woman's betrayed husband, is actually the only one who comes across as at all likable. His pain resonates throughout.

I'd go as far as to say that almost every single thing the book attempted backfired, which is bad, but the author seemed to suspect this in advance, which may be even worse. In a way, that the book seems aware that none of this will at all convince a nonbeliever is refreshing. But that also de-fangles it entirely because there is a sense of predetermined failure from the word go.

God may be all amazing and the Catholic Church the bestest thing, like, ever, but for all that Greene seems to be aware that it lost the war in the marketplace of ideas. The Affair, is, indeed over: Enjoy your pretty cathedrals if you want and don't let the door hit you on your way out of historical relevance.