Book of a lifetime: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

From The Independent archive: Alex Preston is moved by a novel that gains extraordinary intensity from the narrowness of its focus. Mistaken for ‘a love story’, it is in fact an astonishing tale of the ravages of religion

Graham Greene, photographed here at around the age of 50, had an affair with Lady Catherine Walston that lasted for two decades (Getty)

The epigraph to Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads is a magnificent quote from Cardinal Newman: “If there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.” Just as mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, it was the frictions of faith that brought Greene’s novels to life.

The End of the Affair is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn’t live without but struggled to live with.

Drawing on his long affair with his goddaughter Lady Catherine Walston (who refused to leave her husband because of her faith), The End of the Affair is Greene at his most pared-down and intimate: he had never written in the first person before. Gone are the tropical locations, the revolutions and gangsters. The narrative scaffolding of Greene-land has been dismantled, leaving us with a novel that gains extraordinary intensity from the narrowness of its focus.