Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938, and later made into a classic 1947 film starring a young Richard Attenborough.

For Ghost of a Ne'er do Well who first read the book as a teenager 25 years ago it remains one of the best examples of the novel as a multi-layered art form during the 20^th Century.

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton.  Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man.

'Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him'. This powerful and sinister sentence is the opening line of Brighton Rock and the start of a gripping thriller.

Believing he can escape retribution, Pinkie is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, the demimondaine with whom Hale spent his last hours.  Greene’s novel exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived within a doctrine outlined by his hero Robert Browning’s fictional Bishop Blougram:

‘Our interest is in the the dangerous edge of things,

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious Atheist....’

It is quickly apparent that the novel is not just a murder mystery but also addresses metaphysical issues of Good versus Evil and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.  The two opposing characters in the 'Good versus Evil' struggle are Pinkie and Ida. A third important factor is Rose, the young Waitress who could spoil Pinkie’s alibi.  He buys loyalty first by marrying Rose and then by luring her into an apparent suicide pact.  This is a novel without a Hero, other than the life affirming spirit of Ida in seeking truth and justice for Hale and desperately attempting to save Rose from Pinkie in the here and now, the only world we ever really have.