Brighton Rock – Graham Greene, 1938 ★★★½

Catholicism Made Deadly

Tip for parents: Don’t have sex in front of your kids. You may think they’re too young to register anything, but they aren’t. Consider the protagonist of Brighton Rock, teen crime lord Pinkie Brown.

Even by the diabolic standards of British literature, Pinkie Brown is one depraved villain. When off to court a lovestruck lass, he brings a bottle of concentrated acid. If he fails to kill someone who trusts him, and his target demonstrates renewed loyalty in response, it only deepens his homicidal fury. His hatred is a thing of wonder even among his fellow criminals, and runs so deep as to become a vulnerability by itself:

“Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”

And it’s all because when he was growing up, his parents had him sleep in their room, even on Saturday nights which was their sexy-time. So runs one tangent of this early Graham Greene novel, which proves equal parts Freudian soufflé, Christian parable, and genre mystery. Greene juggles more than he catches, but still manages a riveting story with thematic depth and sensational locale atmosphere.

If the Freudian thing feels a tad reductive, it nevertheless works in the context of setting up Pinkie’s malevolent character. He hates sex and trusts no one. Unfortunately for him, building his life on killing those who cross or threaten him puts him in the unlikely position of having to court a girl even younger than himself, 16-year-old Rose, a waitress whose testimony could tie Pinkie to a mysterious death at the English southern seaside resort town of Brighton. Pinkie figures if he marries docile Rose, it will stop her being a witness for the prosecution.

But does he ever hate the idea of having to consummate his union! Greene writes:

He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a drought of medicine offered that one would never, never take; one would die first – or let others die.

Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) and Rose (Carol Marsh), as depicted in the 1947 film adaptation directed by John Boulting that made both Attenborough and Graham Greene into enduring movie properties. Image from http://www.tufnellparkfilmclub.com/forthcomingattractions/2014/9/9/brighton-rock-john-boulting-uk-1947.

While others find Brighton Rock humorless, Greene does have some fun with Pinkie’s hard-core asexuality. Razor fights don’t faze him, but trying to have his way with a girl in the back of a car leaves him a gasping goldfish. Like drinking, another adult activity he doesn’t care for, just the thought of coitus makes Pinkie physically ill, and resentful of those who enjoy its pleasures without revulsion or shame.

Greene juxtaposes nasty Pinkie with two women with decidedly different outlooks on life. Poor Rose is used to being discarded, and eagerly accepts Pinkie’s limited lovemaking techniques with hunger. She presents readers with a figure of empathy, and as the story moves along, sympathetic tension.

Ida Arnold stands on the other side of the divide from both Pinkie and Rose, a happy-go-lucky woman of years who meets a newspaperman along the Brighton pier grounds shortly before Pinkie murders him in the opening chapter. “Her big breasts, which never suckled a child of her own, felt a merciless compassion,” Greene writes. That odd juxtaposition, “merciless compassion,” is demonstrated not just by her quest for justice, but the way she settles on saving Rose from Pinkie – even after Rose begs her to leave them alone.

The last Greene novel I read, The Confidential Agent, also centers on a reluctant man’s dealings with two diametrically different women, one a doughty figure of independent enterprise, like Ida; the other a sad lost soul who clings irrationally to the first man to talk to her; like Rose. They feel at times more like tropes than characters that way, handmaids marking Pinkie’s journey toward damnation.

Brighton Rock is sometimes called Greene’s first overtly Catholic novel; Catholicism being a defining element for all three characters. Both Pinkie and Rose are Catholics, her more of an actual practicing one but him a hardcore believer all the same. Greene has them discuss their religion many, many times:

“These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,” he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, “torments.”

“And Heaven too,” Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.

“Oh, maybe,” the Boy said, “maybe.”

Ida is completely different, secular in orientation, concerned not with Good and Evil but rather Right and Wrong:

She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with flippancy: life wasn’t so important perhaps to them as what came after: but to her death was the end of everything. At one with the One – it didn’t mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

That Greene is not exactly simpatico with Ida’s sunny nihilism is demonstrated in the way he sets up her character, as more frivolous busybody than avenging angel. She explains her mission as “a bit of life,” and enjoys herself hugely even as her actions cause Rose despair, as well as danger when she triggers Pinkie’s sensitive suspicions.

Brighton Rock works both as a spiritual drama and a suspense story, laying out the problems as well as the promises of faith. At the novel’s outset, Pinkie sees Catholicism as a last-minute escape hatch for his dastardly deeds, provided he can just time his repentance just right: “You know what they say – ‘Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found.’” Until then, he feels free to act in his decidedly un-Christian manner.

Rose too worries about salvation, but in a different, more touching way just as problematic for a true believer:

She would have found the courage now to kill herself if she hadn’t been afraid that somewhere in that obscure countryside of death they might miss each other – mercy operating somehow for one and not the other.

Greene reportedly hated the term “Catholic author,” especially as he got on in life. Much of the magnificence of Brighton Rock lies apart from its metaphysical concerns, specifically in the setting of Brighton itself.

Greene's novel makes use of landmarks regular visitors to Brighton would have known. Here, in a photograph taken around the time of the book's publication, is the Bedford Hotel, which in the novel becomes The Cosmopolitan, operations center of Pinkie's richer rival Colleoni, Image from https://emeraldlamp.blogspot.com/2015/06/graham-greenes-brighton-exploration.html, a treasure trove of now-and-then images of Brighton as depicted in the novel.

Greene’s scene-setting powers are on bold display throughout, as with the opening section describing vacationers milling about:

With immense labor and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors’ caps.

As the novel continues, Greene’s descriptions take on a Thomas Hardy quality, imbuing his environment with an almost sentient consciousness and a sense of judgment for its characters. Given the specifically religious concerns of this novel, this works even better for Greene than it often did for Hardy, though Greene like Hardy suggests an uncaring quality to his cosmos, if not necessarily to its Author.

A major downside of Brighton Rock for me is implausibility. Pinkie is as believable a gang boss as Bugsy Malone. What drives other, older gangsters to follow him is unclear; from the outset it is established they are getting swept off the strand by Colleoni, a tougher, better-connected gangster who unlike Pinkie avoids overt violence. There is talk about running racing bookies, but the only crime we see Pinkie ever involved in is murder, usually with one of his own underlings as the target.

Greene later expressed dissatisfaction with Brighton Rock, noting it started out a straight mystery before morphing into a moral drama. He didn’t seem to like it in either form. “There were no living models for these gangsters, nor for the barmaid who so obstinately refused to come alive,” he wrote in his 1980 memoir, Ways Of Escape.

For me, the divided nature of Brighton Rock works to its credit. As crime fiction, it has the problems noted before, but the way it opens – with a single-chapter narrative regarding the fate of one of Pinkie’s victims – imbues the novel with a suspenseful quality that more or less is sustained through to the last page, even as the book shifts away from genre territory and makes room for extensive what-it-all-means talk.

The book Brighton Rock reminded me of most, both this time and the first time I read it, was Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Like Brighton Rock, it is focused on a young, amoral criminal whose point-of-view we come to know intimately, if not adopt. Both deal with gang violence, both concern themselves with how freedom and morality must go together. Both novels were also made into famous movies.

The key difference is the Catholicism unique to Brighton Rock, and central to Greene’s conception. According to the Boots & Books website, Greene even objected to the first stage treatment of Brighton Rock because he felt it remade Ida into a hero. “The interfering Ida belongs to a kind of artificial surface world in which there is no such thing as good & evil but only right & wrong,” Greene wrote.

For others, this attitude is a point against Brighton Rock. For me, it is part of the satisfying philosophical challenge the book poses. That it doesn’t build toward a clear unifying statement, but ends rather in scenes of both hope and pain, makes Brighton Rock very effective and often brilliant for the way it asks big questions and eschews easy answers.