The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Lust and faith are strange bedfellows, but surprisingly, this novel by Graham Greene works remarkably well.

This book resonates with me, so much so that it makes me want to take a pen and write my story down. I'll start my story: "I'm an ordinary person. An ordinary face: eyes, ears nose and mouth, the way they teach a child kindergarten to sing. Ordinary fears, desires and loves." And the story will continue about the deep desire for "ordinary corrupt human love", over God and godly things, but how God took me and wouldn't let me go. But a person can't write a book anonymously so my unwritten book may only exist in Lucien's library.

I think I may prefer Catholic authors over Protestant ones. I wrote about this idea before way back in 2004 when I was reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Catholics find the body sacred so they write sensually and reverently about physical things. Protestants tend to distance themselves from the physical — the body and blood of Christ is an idea, a concept of redemption — and the body becomes a temptation. But we believe that we will have resurrected bodies on that last day.

The first half reads almost like a slutty novel. It isn't anywhere near explicit and it won't make you break out in cold sweat or anything, but there is no hiding what it alludes to. And for that reason, it is a page-turner, and possibly my favourite Greene novel so far. Can't help it, sometimes I have to submit to my baser tastes. ;)

I wonder what the movie is like. Does it capture the internal monologue of the characters that Greene does so well?