Review: Brighton Rock (1938)

★★★★★

Hi all, and welcome back to rumblewrites. This week’s post is another review, but this time of a book, and it’s my favourite one! This is Graham Greene’s crime masterpiece Brighton Rock.

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Warning: *spoilers ahead*

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

It’s unusual to focus the opening lines of a book on a character who will shortly die, but that’s exactly what Brighton Rock chooses to do. Hale has come to Brighton to distribute cards for a newspaper competition... while on the run from a gang. We follow him through the day as he tries to disappear into the holiday crowds, and attaches himself to a lady: Ida, in a brief moment of passion. But eventually he is alone, isolated, and the gang strike.

Pinkie Brown, or ‘The Boy’ is the gang’s leader. He’s the novel’s central character: a highly damaged, violent and frankly abhorrent 17-year-old, who has recently taken over from the gang’s old leader Kite. While his plan to murder Hale is a success, and his own alibi is water-tight, things quickly start to unravel, and Pinkie spends the rest of the book dealing with the fallout. One of his gang members, Spicer, is tasked with distributing Hale’s leftover cards around Brighton in an effort to confuse investigators about the timing of his death. But a witness, Rose, sees him. Pinkie worries that she’d reveal his gang’s identity and involvement to the police, so he comes up with a solution: to marry her. In the 1930s, when the book is set, wives were unable to testify against their husbands in a court of law. So, he needs Rose to fall in love with him.

Meanwhile Ida, the woman who enjoyed a brief love affair with Hale, is determined to discover exactly what happened to him. She is driven by compassion, and a desire to seek justice for his spirit. She decides to visit Brighton and launch her own enquiry.

Pinkie’s situation only worsens from this point. He gets into a spat with leading mobster Colleoni, murders his own ally Spicer, and finds out that Rose has known of his criminality all along! Feeling trapped, he proposes a suicide pact with Rose.

But it’s too late. Ida is closing in, now with a policeman in tow, and the two groups finally meet face-to-face. In a frenzied attempt to escape, Pinkie throws vitriol at Ida but it backfires and, blinded by it himself, he runs over a cliff to his death.

In the final chapters, Rose goes to confession. She explains to the Priest that there was good in Pinkie, and she was prepared to follow him anywhere, even if that meant her own death. She returns home, looking forward to listening to the tape he had made her on their wedding day. But the tape is nothing more than a declaration of his utter contempt for her.

Pinkie in the 1948 film

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Brighton Rock is a masterful novel. The narrative voice is strong, prose luxurious, and sense of place - 1930s Brighton - vivid. The characters are strong, complex, and fiercely raw. And it is through them that we not only get a thrilling narrative of gang crime, but also a serious meditation on Christian concepts of good and evil. Even the title, Brighton Rock, is a metaphor for original sin:

It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton

We learn that Pinkie is a devout Roman Catholic. He believes in Hell and knows that his crimes are sins for which he will someday pay a price. But he makes a distinction between lawful and divine punishment. He is fearful of sinning according to the laws of the Bible, choosing to abstain from cigarettes, alcohol and sex, but otherwise takes pleasure in violence, mistreatment and cruelty.

But is he redeemable? Well, Pinkie had a rough childhood: poor and unloving, which not only impacted him emotionally, but also drove him to lodge with Kite and enter a life of crime. Here, Greene builds a connection between circumstance and fate. If we consider the question of redeemability from a deterministic angle, Pinkie had no control over his fate… so is it fair to hold him morally accountable for it? This conflict resides both in the mind of the reader and in Pinkie himself.

It also helps to humanise Pinkie and make him more palatable as the novel’s protagonist. He may be abusive, depraved, and altogether nasty, but he’s also deeply troubled, neglected, and fearful. It’s unusual to centre such a dark and meditative novel around children, so these moral questions do well to remind us that, despite the adult themes, Pinkie is just a kid.

Now let’s move onto his counterpart: amateur detective Ida. Everything about her character stands in direct opposition to Pinkie: she is kind, caring, systematic and spiritual. The narrative voice mocks her for this, and tries to depict her as an ineffectual, at times comic figure when she is anything but - Ida is a fierce, strong-willed woman with the power and know-how to bring Hale’s killers to justice. Something even the police couldn’t do.

I personally think the dichotomy between Pinkie and Ida's moral beliefs is reflective of Greene’s own internal conflict. For much of his life, he was an agnostic, but he was later convinced of Christianity - or, at least somewhat convinced (he referred to himself as a “Catholic agnostic”). Perhaps the unconventional and even sinful (by Christian standards) nature of Ida’s character serves as an exposé of Pinkie and Rose’s belief in Christ: it does not give them the superiority they think it does. Nor does it promise salvation.

I like Ida a lot. She’s different. In the crime genre, as in sci-fi and fantasy, women are often given a subordinate role. They are cast aside as victims, supports, or sex objects. Or if they are placed in the limelight, they’re overtly different - weird, sexless, masculine. But not Ida. She’s established in the first chapter as a sensual woman, we learn she’s enjoyed multiple affairs, but she is also intelligent, battling against multiple social norms, and is successful at it too. Now, I’m not calling her a feminist icon, not least because, given Greene’s depiction of women in other novels, I doubt this was his intention. But she’s a person, a real human person who just happens to be a woman. And thank God for that ;)

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The fusion of traditional crime elements with more unexpected factors like the age of the protagonists, violence, morality and religion make Brighton Rock distinct from others in its genre. Because of this, alongside the beautiful prose, complexity of place and character, and fast-paced thrilling storyline, it actually feels real. This is why, for me, Brighton Rock the best book of all time.

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