London Fiction – The End of the Affair

Graham Greene's 1951 novel is mostly about love, sex and religion, but the wartime capital is strongly evoked

Buy my London novel, Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times, either from On London or from Pages of Hackney. It is a political satire about populism, anxiety…and London.

My Penguin paperback edition of Graham Greene’s book came out in the mid-Sixties. Its font is tiny, its pages yellowed and I can’t remember how it came into my possession. Its front cover is a staged photo depicting the novel’s pivotal scene, in which the protagonist’s married lover finds him under a pile of bomb rubble and believes him to be dead. Having prayed it isn’t so, she is surprised when he walks in to join her, battered but not deceased. She’d promised God she would forsake adultery if her paramour lived again, and all sorts of agonies ensue.

Were all this not gripping enough, Greene also sketches scenes and moods of WWII-era London: “a news cinema in Piccadilly”; a VE day celebration in St James’s Park; a “sherry-bar off Tottenham Court Road”. And I will never think of Clapham Common in quite the same way again.

The common, in fact, is never given its full name, perhaps in an attempt – or a literary mime of one – to drape a (very) thin veil of fiction over characters terribly like people from real life. It seems not to be in dispute that Greene’s novel-writing hero, Maurice Bendrix, is based on Greene himself or that the inspiration for his lady-love, Sarah Miles, is the married woman – his goddaughter, no less – he was involved with at the time. And Greene lived on Clapham Common, too, at Number 14 on the North Side, from 1935 to 1940. Gotcha.

In The End of the Affair, the common is a rainswept neutral zone between Bendrix’s rooms – he rents from a live-in landlady, as many Londoners did in those days – and the house on the other side that Sarah shares with her husband. It is a place of chance meetings, desperate hopes of them and Hyde Park corner-type speakers.

There is a dazzling passage near the beginning, when Bendrix muses on the challenges of his trade:

“How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene – the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding towards Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames, looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats – one of those bright, condemned, pre-war summers?”

The Blitz was coming and, later, the VI flying bombs – “robots”, Greene calls them – one of which would land on Bendrix’s dwelling. The novel shows, without telling, the high degree to which London life went on when Adolf Hitler wasn’t bent on terminating it: taxis caught by Charing Cross station; hotels on Eastbourne Terrace, Paddington, with deluxe-sounding names that rented rooms for an hour or two; strap-hanging on the Northern line; a telephone box on New Burlington Street; a rendezvous at the Café Royal.

Can The End of the Affair be called  “a London novel”? The further I progress on my 2024 quest to read and write about 25 pieces of London fiction I hadn’t read before, the less clear I become about what qualifies for that categorisation. But Greene’s story carried me back to the besieged and battered city of 80 years ago, complete with certain Londoners’ frailties, confusions and desires.

John Vane is the pen name of On London founder, publisher and editor Dave Hill. Buy his London novel Frightgeist here or here.