My first contact with Graham Greene’s End of Case came when I did a critical analysis of Neil Jordan’s film adaptation, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliane Moore, for my college magazine. There was a spirit of something intriguing in faith and disbelief, but everything seemed dimmed, obscured, tarnished by the sentimental romanticism characteristic of Hollywood films. However, someone later convinced me to go to the main source and discovered, in Greene’s work, the fourth of his most explicitly Christian novels, what the screens of cinema could not reproduce: the often exasperating complexities of faith and disbelief, and the thin line between fury against God and fear of him.
Doesn’t a story have a beginning or an ending? That’s how Greene’s story begins. Is there anything else that has no beginning or end?romance between writer Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles, the wife of a British officer.
- The illicit romance seems quite routine: the typical passionate artist wooes the boring woman of a bored man.
- But in one of their encounters.
- A bomb that explodes during the German attack on London destroys the room they were in.
- Almost killing Bendrix.
- Event.
- Romance becomes mysteriously bitter and Bendrix falls into a downward spiral of jealousy and desire.
He thinks he’s being changed to a new lover; he then hires a private detective, who ends up confirming his suspicions. But Sarah’s new lover turns out to be the source of all love. The moment Bendrix nearly died, he prayed that God would protect him and promised God that if his lover’s life was saved, he would never see him again. As difficult as it was to give up your forbidden flirtation, the alternative was more painful. I feared not primarily for the body, but for the soul. And here we discover something a little strange and something unique in the midst of the vast literary exploration of sexual sin. In a context in which so many works of fiction treat adultery as “natural”, fully legitimized by the classification of “Romance”, the great theoretical justification of all things, here is a booklet where the woman loves her lover without “L’don’t love’.
This, of course, infuriates the worldly Bendrix, who comes to view religion as another bored husband who retains all his romantic fury, frustrating the artistic expression of his own appetites. And when Sara later contracted tuberculosis and died, she saw her God not only as an intruder, but as a villain.
This is where the narrative intensifies. In her abstinence, in her painful rupture and now in her cruel death, Sarah taught Bendrix more about love than she could have done in the immoral passion of her past together. And Bendrix is now forced, for the first time, to settle for the story with the great Enemy of his carnal appetites, the great unsealed Author who had so unjustly erased his story.
He reminded me of a statement from CSLewis about his youthful atheism: “I didn’t think God existed,” he said, “and I was very angry with him for not existing. “In fact, in the end, how do I raise my fist against the God of Sarah, rejecting the object of his prayers for him, even expressly proclaiming his hatred for God (?I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Sara and you won. With your formidable machinations, you destroy our happiness like a field tractor smashes a rat hole: I hate you, God, do I hate you like you are?), we think it protests too much, doesn’t even realize it’s praying.
No, being angry with God is neither right nor justifiable, but this is a beginning. When the story of the end of romance ends, Bendrix’s Jacobean struggle [1] is just beginning. We are sure that, given the last lines of the novel, we shine on one side of hope, like a light through a broken door ( ?I said to Sara, “All right, do what you want. Bendrix won’t get out of this fight like he did. The reader ends, in fact, with the great expectation that hatred can have a particular advantage over indecision to the extent that it is at least a kind of care, a passion that only awaits the reorientation of the transformative gospel.
[1] A reference to Jacob’s struggle with God, recorded in Genesis 32. [Translator’s note]