Customer Reviews

Brighton Rock

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Having worked my way through about a third of Greene's output, I was quite looking forward to this entertainment about a teenage gangster in 1930s Brighton. At first, the atmosphere met my expectations, with the seedy underbelly of the holiday getaway exposed, with shabby bars, and razor gangs fighting for their slice of the protection rackets. However, the story's themes left me largely unsatisfied, as cardboard characters go through the motions of embodying larger ideas and forces. The book starts with the murder of a corrupt London newspaperman, who is killed by a minor Brighton gang. This gang is led by Pinkie, a 17-year-old sociopath who has filled the void left by the death of the previous leader. Although the newpaperman's murder goes off without a hitch, and the gang appears to be in the clear, problems starts when a hooker with a heart of gold starts poking her nose into the affair. With little to motivate her other than a fleeting connection to the dead man and an awfully stubborn notion of justice, Ida sets out to unmask the truth. Meanwhile, Pinkie's not totally convinced that the gang's tracks are covered and does a little checking around himself. Both PInkie and Ida realize that there is an unwitting witness who, a 16-year-old waitress, named Rose. The story then boils down to a tug-of-war between Pinky and Ida for Rose's loyalty.

Pinkie is a misanthropic pessimist, who looks to violence as the solution to most problems, and is profoundly mentally disturbed, especially when it comes to sex, which a repressive Catholic upbringing has sullied. Ida is his opposite, a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky (and disproportionately represented) type, the hooker who enjoys her work. Pinkie is a brooding thug, with little motivation other than to be on top of the world, preferably with his boot at its neck. Ida is all about carpe diem, living in the moment, and not worrying too much about what tomorrow will bring. Rose sits between them as a naive blank slate, with nothing driving her beyond senseless schoolgirl infatuation. Watching these characters circle each other with scheme and counter-scheme never gets very interesting. They are much much too broad to be believed in, and as vessels of larger themes they never measure up. Nor are the supporting characters of any help, each one more thinly sketched than the one before. It's all very melodramatic, and ends in the only way possible. In interviews, Greene admits his own dissatisfaction with this book. He started it as a straight detective story, and then reconfigured it, which is why the tone veers so strangely partway through.

I read this book because Truman Capote (a great writer) claimed it in an interview as a great novel. Boy was I disappointed. Nothing propelled me to keep turning the pages, and the Catholic symbolism in the book was ridiculously incessant, and only something a fanatical converted Catholic like Greene could have included to such a degree. Pinkie holds a wire flower and pierces his palm with it. Well, that is obviously symbolic of the nails through Jesus' hands...but for what purpose to the story, or to that scene that has nothing religious or metaphyscial in it? And while Greene is capable of great writing, I didn't find any of it in this book.

If you can get over the fact that the menacing antihero is named Pinky, and resist the urge to put words his mouth along the lines of, 'Eh, Dallow, wot are we going to do tonight? Wee-hee-hee; narf!', you'll find this to be one of the most rewarding thrillers out there. Its style gathers enormous momentum, with long, elaborate sentences like gasps of air, and it's difficult to put down. The character of Pinky is one of Greene's most compelling; like any great villian, he arouses both sympathy and disgust, and his eventual failure is almost dissapointing. Greene's usual themes of guilt and redemption and poverty are well turned-out. Also interesting is the half-revealed backstory, never made explicit; the pace of the novel is such that there's no time for exposition. It's a brilliant, vicious knife-thrust of a book, and one of Greene's best.

BRIGHTON ROCK

To oversimplify perhaps, 16-year-old innocent Rose and the 17-year-old Puritanical killer Pinkie represent a Christian version of good and evil-they're almost walking personifications of it. Ida Arnold is the secular world, and in an ordinary melodrama, she would be the hero, because she is the one who persists to see that justice is done.

But Greene's view of Ida is that she is morally superficial, and doesn't understand real good and evil, that is, good and evil with eternal consequences. Pinkie is a nominally Catholic but really Calvinist psychopath, more convinced of the existence of Hell than that of Heaven. Since he knows that Hell is his destination, he can only hope to live here in the posh manner of the big-time gangster Colleoni, Pinkie's rival.

The average watcher/reader of American melodramas would probably be disconcerted by Greene's undercutting of the nominal hero Ida, who is all for truth, justice, and the English way. Her antagonists are not only Pinkie, but also Rose, whom Ida sees herself as protecting. But Rose prefers Pinkie.

The world in which these characters move is the Brit resort Brighton, whose rock candy had the word "Brighton" embedded throughout the stick. It is a world of vacationing typists stenos, and clerks, and is permanently inhabited by seedy grifters and race-track touts. Largely to extort money from betting enterprises, two gangs compete in a protection racket. But Pinkie's operation (he took over for the former leader, who was murdered by Colleoni) is a pathetic imitation of the smooth operation of the larger "mob."

Green's writing style is semi-Hemingwayesque, hard-boiled with brusque dialogue and jump cuts between scenes. The characters all have their signatures-Pinkie's inadequate shoulders and throbbing cheek, Rose's mousiness and bony frame, and Ida's unmaternal but pneumatic breasts. And the minor characters are individualized; for example, there's Colleoni's small-framed pudginess and the detail that Pinkie fixates on, the gold crowns on the red-upholstered chairs in his hotel apartment.

I believe this is the first novel in which Greene's Catholicism was obtrusive, something he got away from in later work like THE QUIET AMERICAN and THE COMEDIANS.

I enjoyed BRIGHTON ROCK. I had never read anything that Graham Greene wrote before picking up this volume, and I was very impressed by so many aspects of it. On the surface, it's simply a gangster story set around the racetrack of a bustling English vacation town in the 1930s. But there are so many little touches and details that Greene adds that all raise this story up and make it more than just another exciting and gory tale of mob violence.

The plot is perhaps the weakest element of the book, but this is not a story that revolves around its plot. The plot points are merely the catalysts that propel these wonderful characters forward. We meet Pinkie, a mere seventeen-year-old, who has found himself in the unenviable task of becoming the head of a criminal organization that is embroiled in a power-struggle with an even larger, better-funded gang. In his world, Pinkie is fighting not only for dominance in his gang, but also battling for territory and control in the town of Brighton. However, he also encounters a strange conflict from an unlikely source: a fun-loving, cheerful, iron-willed woman by the name of Ida.

Ida comes into the story by the most unlikely of coincidences, and is determined to investigate what she feels is a grave injustice. She plays a great foil to Pinkie's character, even though the two of them rarely meet. The only downside that I saw to this fascinating person was the fact that after her fantastic introduction she seems to be coasting through the rest of the novel on autopilot. For a normal book, this would be perfectly expected, but Greene set the bar very high for himself here, especially with this character's motivation, and it just seems a bit jarring when not everything maintains an equal level of excellence.

Greene brings in quite a lot of thought to this novel. Religion, love, spirituality, and death are not things that one expects to undergo detailed analysis on the pages of a crime thriller, yet Greene approaches all of these with maturity and understanding. Each character (bar a handful) is given believable motivations. There are some plot pieces that are predictable, but that only means that I was daring the characters not to go the way that they did, and genuinely upset when they did unfortunate things, even though I had anticipated them. Greene draws on so many ideas to breath life into his novel. He places familiar concepts into irregular characters, and unfamiliar concepts into regular characters; the results are often wonderful and thought provoking.

As I mentioned, I'd not read a Graham Greene novel prior to this, but I certainly plan on doing so in the future. Greene packed quite a bit of careful thought into this intelligent thriller, and the outcome is as exciting as it is reflective. Gripping and spellbinding, this is definitely worth reading.

Graham Greene writes crisply, and the colours and textures with which he paints an inter-war Brighton are vivid, if uniformly gray and brutal. The story is simple enough: I don't think it's what the characters do as much as what they stand for which interests Greene - for this reason the protagonists are not especially lifelike: Pinky is all brooding, anti-social and violent; absent even a hint of redemption (Greene uses the word 'poisoned' a lot in relation to Pinky), whereas Ida is drawn as a libertine Dickensian harlot whose only motivating moral is the pursuit of fun ' and, somewhat incongruously, really ' justice, for the forsaken Hale. The opposing forces or good and evil are far too contrary to have been meant to be taken at face value.

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.

This is the second book by Graham Greene that I have read, and found it to be a wonderful book. The symbolism, while at times a bit too obvious, aids Greene in communicating his message - that being, as other's have said, the struggle between "good and evil". While the character's of Pinky, the 17 year old gangster, and Rose, the 16 year old girl who becomes embroiled in Pinky's life, are used to contrast good and evil, Rose and Ida Arnold are utilised by Greene to juxtapose innocence and experience, another of the novel's central themes. I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the talent's of Greene, and for those who search for more than just a "story" when they read.

Admittedly, this is the first of Graham Greene's novels that I have had the pleasure to read. That being said, I was thoroughly entraced by Greene's exposition of the banality of evil and the differences between absolute morality and religion. The story of an extrodinarily young (17) criminal of pre-war England gives the reader chills with its insightful and plausible view into the mind of an innocent (experiencially speaking)yet extrodinarily brutal and amoral individual and the havoc reaked in the name of self-preservation and utter selfishness.

I was a Graham Greene virgin and my first encounter was hard and awakening. I thought Greene combined psychology and philosophy with pure fiction. It is a book which can be read on many levels, and all will give enjoyment. I myself, am a philosophy and English Literature student and found the relevence to these topics amazing. Anyone else who does philosophy will want to question Hume's ideas and I suggest those who don't study the subject read up on philosophical ideas about human nature. All in all, a facinating book. I have not yet read any other Greene and would be delighted if someone could point me in the direction of another of his works, one possibly with parallels to Brighton Rock. Thanks

Greene describes Brighton so that I can see it, even though I've never been there. The characters are alive and real to me, even though they are types I have never met in real life. The plot kept me reading as if it were a contemporary thriller. It was creepy and totally engaging. My only problem here, as with all four Graham Greene books I've read, is the Catholic symbolism. I'm Jewish, so I feel really left out. The struggle between good and evil is interesting, but the pressure felt by the Catholic characters not to sin, is something I've never felt, although I am a moral and ethical person.