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Adam Dalva's Reviews > The End of the Affair
The End of the Affair
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Remarkable structure - the plot twists and turns in unexpected ways. The meta-textual aspects were great (his mini-essay on flat characters toward the end jumps out), as were the ways that he allows the narrator to waffle. There is a found text interval that I found slow, which brings us to the one problem: this is one of Greene's "Catholic Novels," and I am convinced that the focus on Catholicism did damage to the book. The moment the upper case Him appeared, the plot began to diffuse and the stakes were reduced. It is still a pleasure, but despite my affection for the characters, returns diminished.
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Started Reading
March 18, 2014
– Shelved
March 18, 2014
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Finished Reading
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Peter
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Mar 19, 2014 06:52PM
thumbs up (for your review and of course this book too)
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Yeah I just got angry when He appeared.
I remember you carrying this all over ACA
I don't know if you ever listen to audiobooks, but the reading by Colin Firth is very good.
Exactly right, Adam. This Greene novel starts out very fine, but the gradually introduced Catholic ramblings just turned me off in a great way.
There's no question that Greene is working through his doubts in some of his books. He converted so he could marry the woman he wanted to when they were very young. By the end, in The Burnt-Out Case, he's done. He's now calling himself a Catholic atheist. The heroes of Burnt-Out are an atheist doctor, who is very devoted to his patients in a leper colony, and the title character, a lapsed Catholic who never recovers his faith, but starts to find some meaning in helping others.
Greene's scorn in the novel is reserved for Catholics, including some of the priests and missionaries at the colony. The villain, so to speak, is a former priest who is always spouting pious platitudes and pontificating about Catholic doctrine and theology. But his actions are the opposite of his talk. He's married to a young woman, whom he treats as a sex slave. He likes that she is not educated and won't "talk back." Subsequent actions show that he's not only a hypocrite, but a vile and criminal person.
