Readers of fiction are familiar with modern works classified as magical realism. But what about miraculous realism? Does it exist as a separate literary genre? Is it part of the magical realism movement that emerged as an influential force in fiction during the second half of the twentieth century? Or does it follow different rules of its own, drawing on metaphysical and existential currents that more playful tales of magic and fantasy do not share?
I'm thinking of works such as Robertson Davies's Fifth Business , Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus , José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night , and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair . Here the 'magic' exists alongside skepticism and doubt. In each of these novels, uncanny events occur that could be mere coincidences, but of such a marked, unlikely degree that they demand scrutiny, contemplation, perhaps even some sort of response. If the potency of magic is measured by its life-changing force, these works of miraculous realism suggest powers as meaningful as those contained in a witch's spell or an eleven-inch holly wand with a phoenix feather core.
Both magical realism and miraculous realism are throwbacks, reminding us of the earliest origins of storytelling, the epics and folktales where both the magical and miraculous elements mixed effortlessly with the practical, realistic details. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that, after the grim period of history marked by the two world wars, when so much evil was dispensed with sober, almost bureaucratic efficiency, that the literary world would crave a return of both the fanciful qualities of the magical, and the redemptive promises of the miraculous. Yes, I believe these two currents go hand in hand, indeed have always done so.
Graham Greene may often be cited as a Catholic writer, even as the preeminent Catholic novelist of 20th century literature, but The End of the Affair is his only novel in which miraculous events intrude into the plot. His other popular metaphysical novels, The Power and the Glory , Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter , deal with issues of redemption, but without any deviations from straightforward naturalistic realism. Greene may believe that the "soul" is his battlefront in these works, but materialist readers are free to assign causality to firing neurons or Freudian schemas or various other forces as they see fit. The End of the Affair is a different kind of story entirely. The main characters (and, by implication, the readers) are each required to deal with the uncanny, and although denial is an option—albeit an increasingly problematic one, as the novel progresses—it comes with its own share of anxieties and complications. The more Greene's characters seek comforting explanations, the less they are comforted, the less are matters explained.
Greene starts off his novel with misdirection. It’s worth recalling that Greene classified his works into two categories, literary fiction and 'entertainments'—the latter emphasizing elements of mystery and suspense. At the time of The End of the Affair , he had just come off a huge success with the book and film of The Third Man , a spy story set in postwar Vienna. Greene understood his audience’s growing interest in plots of espionage and intrigue, fueled by the Cold War tensions, and the movie of The Third Man was the biggest British box office success of 1949. (Although The Daily Worker , Britain’s communist newspaper, griped that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible"). Three years later Ian Fleming would publish his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale , and over the ensuing decade John le Carré, Len Deighton and a host of other British writers would borrow Graham’s blueprint and turn it into a hugely popular niche of the entertainment industry, one that is still ringing the cash register to the tune of billions of dollars in the present day. Graham’s readers were hungry for more of this kind of escapist fiction. Now with The End of the Affair , Greene tantalized them with bits of suspense and intrigue, but incorporated into a very different type of story. In one of the most daring literary moves of the era, he planned to surprise his growing crossover audience with a daunting, occasionally theologically-charged novel—but one that was disguised as a classic thriller.
All the ingredients of the 'suspense' novel are present in the opening pages. The narrator Maurice Bendrix, like Greene an author who has both commercial and literary aspirations, hires a private investigator to track the movements of a woman. He fears that Sarah has taken a lover, but in a strange twist (one of many in this book), Sarah is not his wife, although he had an affair with her that had ended during the war years for reasons he still cannot understand. In addition, Greene gives us a jealous husband, the civil servant Henry Miles, Bendrix's former rival and increasingly his collaborator as they try to uncover the 'truth' about Sarah.
This is, of course, the famous love triangle, but Greene takes it in unexpected directions. The husband is unwilling to investigate his spouse's suspicious behavior, and after he tells of his worries to Bendrix, the former lover steps in to solve the mystery. He concludes that Sarah must be seeing another man when she disappears on various 'errands'—unexplained absences that seem to be subterfuges and excuses. Bendrix is determined to learn the new rival's identity—and potentially turn the love triangle into a love rectangle. He visits a detective agency, and soon the bumbling and endearing investigator Parkis is on the trail of Mrs. Miles.
This is a set-up—not just for Sarah, but for the readers too. When a private eye shows up in a novel, we expect crimes and sordid details to come, but the crisis facing Sarah is an existential one, and the guilt will increasingly fall on the shoulders of man who launched the investigation. The awkwardness of the detective should be our first clue. Parkis is as innocent and easily fooled as a child, and to make sure we understand the incongruity, Greene assigns him an actual youngster as a companion —Parkis's son, a twelve-year-old he is "training in the business." Clearly this is not Casino Royale , and our investigator is no James Bond, not even an Austin Powers—although these two characters, Parkis and his son, end up providing comic relief in a novel that is in search of bigger game than a cheating lover caught in the act.
The private investigator, for all his lack of wiles, comes up with a big catch—namely, Sarah's diary. This forms the second major section of the novel, with the narrative voice moving from the jealous former lover to the women whose mystery he is trying to unlock. But, as it turns out, Sarah is in pursuit of her own mystery, and her diary is an anguished account of faith and doubt, and eventually conversion and reconciliation. All of the events we followed in the early pages of the novel—from her breakup with Bendrix to her suspicious errands—now are given a different meaning. Yes, Bendrix has a rival, but not one of this world.
Or perhaps I should say, not solely of this world. For in the closing pages of The End of the Affair , divine and human affairs seem to converge and overlap. Here, Graham Greene, the same realist who could dish up spy stories and crime tales, now recounts incidents that could be taken straight from hagiography. But this author rarely does anything in a direct way, and almost every ingredient in The End of the Affair can be interpreted in multiple ways. How fitting, then, that Sarah has been seeing at least two men—one a rationalist atheist and the other a priest. When Bendrix confronts the man he assumes has been sleeping with her, he instead gets a dose of materialist skepticism—another comic turnabout in a story where almost every tragic angle comes coated with dark humor.
At this point, as at several other junctions of The End of the Affair , readers may believe that they have found the 'solution' to the story. And if this were a conventional mystery, there would be little to do at this point except to tidy up a few details, punish the wicked and send the 'good guys' on their way. But almost every aspect of the conventional suspense story is now turned upside down by Greene. The ‘good guys” do the suffering in Greene's theology, and the mysteries remain mysterious at the tale's close. Even that ultimate source of what Frank Kermode calls the "sense of an ending " —namely a character's death—fails to provide a moment of closure in the context of this novel. And I find it fitting that Greene again and again addresses Kermode's critique of the consciously false ideology of time at the heart of fiction. Greene needs his story to have at least one foot outside of time, and is willing to tackle philosophical as well as literary constraints to force the issue. (At the close of the book, a character even cites Augustine's dictum that time "came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.") These are ambitious goals for a short novel of little more than 50,000 words.
The upshot is a book that provokes strong reactions. Critic Michael Gorra has noted that many readers, coming to the end of this novel, "have looked for a wall to throw the book at." At the other extreme, authors as different in temperament as John Updike and Evelyn Waugh lavishly praised Greene's achievement. Two different movie versions have been made of the book—in 1955 and 1999—and in 2004 Jake Heggie launched his opera of The End of the Affair . Perhaps we live in skeptical, materialist times, but Greene's 'miraculous realism' apparently hasn't lost its appeal.
And why? Certainly the themes of redemption and existential meaning are timeless ones. But in the final analysis, the intensity of this book must also stem from its alignment with the novelist's own life, and his personal struggles with adultery, faith, the responsibilities of the author, and the manner in which belief and practical day-to-day concerns intersect. The more we learn about Graham Greene the man, the more we must view this short novel as of central importance in defining his vocation and worldview. In other words, the same book that dares to encompass the miraculous, resonates so powerfully because it also confronts the pragmatic and everyday. Readers can decided for themselves whether that’s a contradiction or a convergence.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture. His newest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .