Read Brighton Rock when I was a young, voracious reader but this little novel is a mature treatise on the nature of love, desire and jealousy. Structurally surprising, it is a story about a story and written by a writer (Greene) writing about a writer (Bendricks). The self-conscious narrator in the first half of the book speaks with the twisted hatred of a male lover betrayed and abandoned. This is replaced convincingly by the feminine perspective voiced through the intimate medium of diary entries (perhaps borrowed from Joyce's 'Ulysses'?). The end of the affair, secretive by nature occurs half-way through the book when the tryst is revealed and confessed hence bringing about the demise of its existence. The Affair in the title alludes of the sexual liason but also to life as a trivial inconvenience. It examines the tension bewteen extremes such as God versus the Devil, good versus evil and love versus jealousy and asks whether such boundaries exists. Both Bendricks and Sarah suffer a crisis of faith in their own manner - and was as passionate as Richard Dawkins in its indictment of organised religion. Well written and an inciteful multi-layered view on adultery.
This is all part of my big book-reading campaign for 2007 and I'm hoping that Bookcrossing will help. Was originally aiming for 50 books by December 2007 but that equates to roughly a book a week which is going to be pretty ambitious when I've got so many ECA's this year!
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