Graham Greene's Brighton Rock

Graham Greene liked to poke at things, often to the detriment of those who took him or his characters at face value. Brighton Rock, a 1930s-set book written to be easily adaptable (which it later was), is one of those prodding works. The story centers around a sociopathic teenage gangster named Pinkie who is vying for control of Brighton's underworld after his mentor Kite is murdered. The plot follows his violent rise to power, his deceitful marriage to a young waitress named Rose to silence her as a witness, and his escalating conflict with the determined and life-loving amateur detective Ida Arnold, who is investigating the murders.

In this story, Greene in his prodding way pits wicked "Catholics" against a heroic secular investigator. One might assume, given the breadth of low-brow Christian-beating material out there, that Greene himself is playing into the same exhaustive tropes one may be well familiar with, but the great irony of these characters is readily apparent to those familiar with Greene's subtlety. Greene had an aversion, like many British people do, to saying what he really meant, rewarding instead those who paid close attention. The irony in Brighton Rock is more straightforward than his other works however. Neither Pinkie, nor his enemy Ida Arnold, have any meaningful basis for doing the things that they do. Pinkie uses his Catholic moniker to manipulate Rose into silence, and Ida uses her "common worldly sense" to come to the moral conclusion that she ought to stop him. Since the world is arguably more filled with promiscuous and self-righteous types like Ida Arnold than sociopathic murderers, Greene is most certainly drawing more cultural attention to the latter. He uses Catholicism in a bit more of a tropey way than some of his later books, as his sociopathic Pinkie is really only himself familiar with the faith insofar as he believes that it damns him.

The rest is Greene as one knows him: sharp cuts from a moment of action to reveal the spillage of one's doubts and moral unease, coupled with descriptors and prose that makes one ashamed of their intellectual complacency. Though dubbed one of his "Catholic novels," Brighton Rock uses theology as more of a cultural backdrop than a serious central theme (as presented some of Greene's other famous works such as The Power and the Glory), and does not depict any "good" Catholics, but Greene never gives anything for free. He drags his reader into the seedy depths of Brighton's gambling underbelly and leaves them to pick up the pieces, one killing after another. One of my personal favorite scenes is at the very beginning, when journalist Fred Hale is making small talk with Brighton sea-goers at the Palace Pier in a bid to keep himself from being killed. It's perhaps my favorite introduction to any of his novels.

For those wanting a fun, comedically dark gangster story, with a lot to say about the Ida Arnold's of the world, I would give Brighton Rock an 8.9/10