Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML: Originally published in 1938, Graham Greene's chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare is a masterpiece of psychological realism and often considered Graham Greene's best novel. It is a fascinating study of evil, sin, and the "appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," a classic of its kind. Set in Brighton, England, among the criminal rabble, the book depicts the tragic career of a seventeen-year-old boy named Pinkie whose primary ambition is to lead a gang to rival that of the wealthy and established Colleoni. Pinkie is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of the spirit or of the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed Kite and also for the death of Hale, he is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, he is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands. He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale's death. For the sheer joy of it she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice. When finished, the listener is sure to ponder some lofty moral issues to which Greene, a Catholic writer, withholds easy judgments.… (more)
Genres
Collection
Publication
Media reviews
User reviews
The Book Report: Charles "Fred" Hale, aka newspaper columnist "Kolley Kibber," is in Brighton to hand out paper-chase prizes to loyal readers of his paper. He's also running as fast as he can from someone who means to kill him. Why? We aren't told. Who? That's made very plain
In a vain effort to live to fight another day, Hale hooks up with Ida, a blowsy pub-crawling broad with a heart of gold and a steely sense of right and wrong. Her trip to the public convenience to wash up a bit before her bit of fun with Hale allows the killer time enough to deal with Hale...permanently.
Ida, once she figures out the gentleman (!) who stood her up (and after she washed and everything!) in Brighton is the murder victim in her next morning's paper, determines that Hale will be avenged despite his lack of family, his murder being ruled a natural death, and her own complete lack of detective experience. The fun of the book, the bulk of the story, is in Ida circling closer and closer to the party we know to be the killer, and the multiple characters trailing in his wake slowly falling to his amoral, sociopathic self-preservation response. In the end, triumph changes Ida. The consequences of her victory over the forces of evil are such that she undergoes a sea change of feeling and desire. Justice never comes without a price. Never. Everyone involved in the story pays. Some with their lives.
My Review: Moralistic, yes; marvelously written, oh my yes! Greene's characters are, as in others of his work that I've read, mouthpieces for a worldview. He elevates them from the dreary, tiresome leadenness of Message Characters by imbuing them with a sense of humor as black as the world they inhabit, the world of carneys and racing touts and waitresses trapped forever in second-rate diners and gangsters whose souls are so dead to beauty that they can't see anything but violence as a solution to any and every problem.
It surprised me how often I laughed as I read on in this grisly, blood-soaked bagatelle. And yes, I meant "bagatelle" -- light, airy, almost inconsequential read that "Birghton Rock" is. I was completely delighted by the tone of the book, I was half in love with Ida, I was even sad for the killer and his parched, wounded soul.
A marvelous entertainment, then, and one whose substantial moral manages to keep itself underneath the story being told, supporting it. As it should be. Well made, worthwhile fiction. One expects nothing less from Graham Greene, no?
For all the solemnity of Greene's main object, at times he pulls some surprises: just when the going begins to get truly rough, there is a delightfully comic scene involving a lecherous but repressed lawyer that had me laugh out loud. I haven't seen the film version, but the lawyer, Prewitt would be a peach of a part for some hammy old Shakespearean actor fancying a break into the big time.
The narrative didn't really rivet me; Greene's writing is a bit too artful to be truly exciting, and in places I found Brighton Rock rather too easy to put down. Having said that, what I really admired were the backlights and figurative plays with which Greene makes his point - they exist alongside the plot, so that Greene can say his piece without having to shoehorn it into the story as bluntly as a lesser author might.
On the surface this is a book about Pinkie trying to cover his tracks and having everything escalate out of his control. But just like the glitz and glamour of the resort town, there is a lot going on underneath the surface. A superb character study, as we delve into the mind of Pinkie Brown and see a young boy who never had a chance, a product of poverty and neglect, he was destined to end up as he did. His relationship with Rose is both dark and twisted, yet gives a glimpse of tenderness now and again as well. Graham Greene also touches on religion, contrasting how Catholicism influenced both Rose and Pinkie, yet non-religious Ida appears to have the stronger moral core.
The unique vision of Graham Greene has resulted in a book that is both complex yet thrilling. Timeless, entertaining and thoughtful, I highly recommend Brighton Rock.
How clever is that, to invent slang that sounds authentic? Greene is a master! Has anyone also noticed that he is a master of the sweeping cinematic technique of describing something mundane (a walk around low-class Brighton) from the viewpoints of multiple characters, and turning the lead of our common experience into literary gold, just like Joyce's Ulysses.
I pity the reviewer who gave this one sta
Brighton Rock was written in 1938 and is one of Graham Greene’s most famous works. It opens with a newspaper man who has fallen in with the wrong crowd visiting Brighton for work and where
Ida initially believes that she has simply been stood up but learns about Hale's death a few days later from a local news report, supposedly from a heart condition. Knowing in her gut that something is not right she sets out to uncover the truth. This spells trouble for the gang led by seventeen-year-old socio-path Pinkie. To cover his tracks Pinkie, is forced into marrying a timid, trusting, sixteen-year-old waitress Rose to stop her testifying against him and to spill yet more blood."He was a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood." When the police refuse to look into the case Ida continues to hound the pair as she struggles to make Rose see sense and ‘save’ her becoming an unlikely detective in the process.
The 1930's were a time of depression and austerity in Britain. Both Pinkie and Rose have had difficult childhoods, having been raised in slums, both had also come late arrivals at the initiation into love and affection, so it is hardly surprising that Pinkie turned to violence and crime. However, religion is the biggest mover here. Both Pinkie and Rose are Catholics who believe in mortal sin but whereas Pinkie believes in Hell but not Heaven Rose puts her faith in Pinkie with an almost religious fervour. Pinkie is sexually frustrated, riddled with guilt and disgust with the act. He is a cold and calculating socio-path, but Rose believes that he is not beyond redemption. Her blind love for him creates a struggle within Pinkie, he is unfamiliar with such unswerving affection. In contrast Rose's problem is that she does value herself. She is drawn to Pinkie's nihilism simply because she doesn't believe that she deserves anything better, that cruelty and disappointment is her allotted dues. In contrast Ida is superstitious and has loose sexual morals, she puts her faith in Hale, a man whom she has only just met, but her greatest belief is in the sanctity of life. Meanwhile, Hale employs three different names trying to find anonymity in an effort to protect himself from a harsh world. All are struggling in their own way. Paradoxes and dualities therefore seem to represent what was happening in the wider community. Certainly like Greene’s Brighton, where beyond the gaudy attractions and bright lights of the front, everything appears depressed and decaying. Ida seems to embody a world turning from religion to man-made materialism.
However, all the characters are only very loosely and seem to lack any real substance and it is for that reason that I felt that there was something lacking. Whilst I found the chapter set at the racecourse with its dodgy bookies and gangs gratuitously slashing each other with knives entertaining, I found Pinkie’s angst with society at times interminable. In contrast Rose and Ida felt seriously underdeveloped. Certainly Ida is far from the typical detective.
Pinkie and Ida each try to impress their world view upon the Rose but in a world when we have seen such magnificent literary characters as Hannibal Lecter and Annie Wilkes (in Misery) he seemed lost rather than having any real menace or be frighteningly coercive. He just seems to have a very dim view of the world. Meanwhile in our hopefully more enlightened times it is hard to comprehend Rose's pig-headed devotion to him.
Overall I found this book still to be a powerful read and one that deserves to be continued to be widely read despite what I regard as its flaws.
Pinkie, the gunsel, a Catholic from the slums, has good and evil on his mind, which is a very different thing entirely. Although the murdered man is judged to have died of natural causes, Ida's nosing around upsets the gang, and Pinkie in particular, who commits another murder to keep one of his gang quiet, and forces himself to marry a young waitress who can provide evidence against them. Not that she would. 16 years old and another Catholic, she doesn't see Pinkie's sexual disgust, takes his lies and silence as love, and feels she would go to the ends of earth and heaven for him.
The writing is marvelous, never more than needs to be said, but atmospheric all the same, viscerally communicating the grimy lower-class hopelessness of Brighton and the people in it. The bigger question - which is true, good and evil or right and wrong - is left to the reader at the end.
This is a powerfully rendered book that really sets the atmosphere of a pre WWII Brighton and while the reader doesn't invest too much emotionally with the characters you will still find yourself reading avidly until the gripping conclusion.
I read this book for GCSE (O Levels!), many years ago so I was excited to get the chance to listen to the unabridged audiobook. I'll confess I didn't enjoy this much when it was compulsory reading but as a listener I could really appreciate Graham Greene's use of the
It's a shame that audiobook ratings are collected in with the printed book ratings because this narrator committed the unforgivable sin of dropping his voice to inaudible levels at times, which meant I had to have the player volume on too high to hear those parts. I would have given 3 stars but that would have been unfair on Mr Greene who has written a fascinating depiction of a small time protction gang trying to hang on to their turf after the death of Kite, their leader.
The characterisations are strong and Samuel West's interpretation of these is good. Pinkie is a simply abominable teenager, yet it's hard not to feel at least some empathy with him as he struggles to hold his seventeen year old head above the onslaught of older, wiser or more powerful characters.
Written in 1938, it is very much a battle of good over evil, as were many books of that time. Although Pinkie is clearly evil, his Catholic upbringing haunts him, in spite of his attempts to slough it off. Rose, his girl, depicts good but is naiive and easily manipulated, while Ida is Good in all its glory, fighting for what she believes in.
I certainly enjoyed Brighton Rock more this time around. The audio version was excellent, with the exception of the problem mentioned earlier, and the story was gripping. It is a bit dated, but I think most readers are aware of that when they approach it.
Worth a listen.
My Penguin twentieth-century classics edition has a "note to American readers" in the back, which is an unusual concept (and a bit belated if you do not flip around like I do). I found the one from the editor explaining what "Brighton rock" actually is very useful. The condescending one from the author explaining something any reader of the book should have been able to infer, less so.
Being a Canadian, we were already somewhat under the influence of English literature in general, and the foreignness of Graham Greene just that much more allure.
The world-view, attitudes and daily activities of the so-called low-lifes, and of the supposedly good characters, were nothing like I had ever encountered in my everyday life, or in any other literature I had read, up to this point. It was like going into another world.
Since that time, I have tended to shy away from any biography of Graham Greene on purpose, because I do not want my image of him to be tarnished by the actual details of his life. For the most part, I like to leave authors alone and let them have their privacy. If they wanted to write me a letter describing their petty failings and their cheating on their wives or husbands, they probably would have done so already.
Alright, I will admit I have read a couple of biographies, but really the ones that concentrate on literary analysis and criticism, rather than the daily life events.
I always wondered if this book represented a true slice-of-life of English society at the time it was written. Maybe that is the wrong question. I could not go to a city such as Brighton and suddenly discover all the characters of this book. But that was not the point. The point was to use imagination to say something about society in general, not predict the likelihood of a reader stumbling across identical characters should he or she conduct a fact-finding or character-finding mission. (Note to self: get a life; read the book and do something useful afterward; there is no point going to England to find similar characters, especially 40 or 50 years too late.)
I have just finished this book and I was
There is another layer to this book. Pinkie is a Catholic (or "Roman" as he calls it) and he is pursued by an atheist avenging character called Ida. This contrast gives the book an added dimension. The Catholic view of sin and morality versus a non-religious moral sensibility.
What really stands out about this book is the quality of the writing. Graham Greene created a gripping tale; evokes the pre-WW 2 era beautifully; evokes a strong sense of pre-war Brighton; and overlays it all with philosophical musings. A classic.
Right and wrong have no meaning for Pinkie nor even for the 'good' Rose
Greene didn't write this as a moral tract and it works well as a story. Who will survive, who won't, will Ida succeed in her pursuit for justice for Fred's killers, and Pinkie? What of him. Indeed, what of him. Words fail me.
For me, excellent pacy writing, plus descriptive details that reinforce the seediness of the 'other' Brighton: even the beach is mucky. The blue skies and the invigorating atmosphere of the Bank Holiday crowd in the opening paragraph are but a tease.
Pinkie, the teenage gangster, is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of the spirit or of the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed Kite and also for the death of Hale, he is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, he is
He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale's death. For the sheer joy of it she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice.