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Second Reading 9/27/14

If love is anything, it is a spiritual thing. It is a release of control to someone else based on faith. When that faith is fulfilled, love is ever-present, but if that faith is forsaken there is nothing left of our humanity to give except for the darkest parts that we keep for ourselves: hate. And if that faith should be restored, even if for a moment, this kind of hate can vanish as if it never was. This is what love is and Greene writes it down in spite of a possible denial of its full and complete definition. There is not a dishonest word about love in this book.

The End of the Affair then goes one step beyond love and dives into the spirituality of humans. It explores our receptiveness to a belief in God even though such beliefs only become fully realized under times of hardship and distress. Humans pray to God for deliverance from evil; and even when we pray to give thanks, it's generally a thanks for an absence of evil. It's as if evil drives our beliefs in God and God is only needed because we live in an evil world where bad happenstance is commonplace.

The final chapters of the book explore the evidence that is commonly used to support our faith in God. If a flight attendant survives a fall from 33,000 feet after a bomb destroys her plane, is her life a divine miracle of God? Sometimes a person falling from the sky will hit just the right tree in just the right way, and then land in just the right place to survive. Greene gives this same sort of evidence for the existence of God and then lets his readers decide: miracle or chance.

These subjects drive The End of the Affair towards being a spiritual book. The spirituality professed, however, consists of a reality that is rooted in an irrational world. And under these conditions God is just as likely to exists as not.

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First Reading 6/18/09

In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene examines the lives of three imperfect, and by definition, human characters. The plot, as denoted by the title of the book, allows the reader to experience the consequences of living in various states of the human condition as the characters grow, if sometimes not deliberately or willingly, to become less imperfect. The characters experience change along lines that transition between hate, passion, and love; acquaintance, colleague, and friend; and atheism, faith, and religion.

The human experiences within these themes are passionately and realistically described. Also to Greene’s credit, he presents these experiences without personal judgments as to which state of existence is more or less imperfect. To this end, Greene’s words become introspective to the reader and allow the reader to map out where he or she resides along these same lines of transition.