|
I finished this a few days ago and while I was still stewing over it I scribbled down these few immediate reactions...
In a word: overwrought.
Give me murder and mayhem over adultery, any time. Adultery is one of those subjects that turns me away, most especially where it seems you are expected to sympathise with the participants ... although I don't think that's the case here. With The End of the Affair I am assuming Greene meant me to despise the narrator. How could anyone not despise the narrator? If that's what he wanted, then he succeeded admirably. I am less sure what Greene's intentions were with Sarah, there are some quotes I could give that make her seem pretty despicable. I suspect Greene wanted me feel sorry for her, but she betrayed her husband's trust with apparently no mitigating circumstances.
The supposed love affair seems to be entirely physical, there is almost no sense that the two ever actually liked each other.
Come the last third or so of the book we are pummelled with variations of how God and love and hate interrelate, but we got the point back on the first page with "So this is a record of hate far more than of love", and the surrounding whine. How much more am I expected to put up with? If I didn't value my ereader so much I would have thrown it across the room on several occasions. And Sarah for sainthood? Please, please, give me a break!
In another thread on MR, about a quote from another author, I wrote: "the excerpt was what I would describe as first-person self-obsessed, so YA would have been my first guess". Well, with The End of the Affair we have an example where my guess would have been wrong. This is a book of self-obsession, the woman is just another means by which the narrator obsesses about himself. First-person is the obvious way to present such self-obsession, so it's not really a criticism of Greene for his choice, but still, the level of melodrama means a comparison with YA seems particularly apt.
The introduction to my edition was by Monica Ali, 2004. If there had been any pips in the story this introduction smoothed the way by sucking them all out ... but having seen what she had to work with, perhaps I should be more forgiving.
|