The Beginning of the Affair

Writers You Should Be Reading: Graham Greene

Writers You Should Be Reading is a regular feature of my blog in which I hope to introduce (or reintroduce) authors that are worth picking up and spending time with. Sometimes these will be new or emerging authors and other times they will be established figures. Either way, if you have suggestions for Writers You Should Be Reading, feel free to send them my way in the comments below.

There are few books that begin as perfectly as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Here’s the first paragraph:

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who – when he has been seriously noted at all – has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet night on the Common in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft, to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.’”

In this passage, there is a notion, an intention, and an abstraction, but all are bound in the moment.

The notion: Control is fleeting and illusory.

The intention: To instigate within the reader a reflection on how concrete we find that illusion of control.

The abstraction: That we are entering a story about story, and possibly one about the Story.

The moment: The concrete and tangible moment when Maurice Bendrix is brought back in contact with Henry Miles, the husband of the woman with whom he had the aforementioned affair.

This is masterful storytelling; the kind in which the layers of it all blend seamlessly into a single notion – that we have been ushered into this world by Bendrix knowing full well that we are being fed an arbitrary and fabricated account of these characters’ lives.

And yet, we believe. That’s great fiction. That’s why you should be reading Graham Greene if you are not already.