Laura’s Favourite Book #2: Brighton Rock
Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust. – Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Why Brighton Rock?
Continuing the theme I started with Rebecca, Brighton Rock is intense to say the least. It’s this strange, heady mix of poverty-sticken provincialism and the potential damnation of one’s eternal soul. I’m not the world’s greatest Graham Greene fan, but both Brighton Rock and his short story The Destructors have lingered with me long after reading, those musings of what it means to be truly evil having crept right under my skin and then crawling towards my soul.
And like Rebecca, Brighton Rock drags you straight into a world that might not be so recognisable by today’s standards, but would’ve been in the Thirties, when it was still worth escaping London to the seaside on a Bank Holiday, when the cramped darkness of the slums was drearily relatable, and when the rules of religion and etiquette collided with a lawlessness fuelled by knives and poison.
Story
The story is a classic race against time thriller. We can classify the psychopathic Pinkie as the protagonist, but it’s interesting that the story both opens and closes with other people’s perspectives. This maybe suggests that with all this discussion of Good and Evil, there are no main characters when we start thinking on a cosmic scale.
In my opinion, there are no huge twists in the tale (though there are a few well-timed deaths), but instead we experience the walls closing in around the characters as the sense of urgency builds and builds. The three main characters’ goals complicate and converge, before escalating into a lethal denouement that leaves the reader wondering if there could’ve been any other way – and yet knowing that what happened was inevitable.
Character
The three main characters are Pinkie, our resident baby-faced gangster, Rose, the God-fearing waitress with a photographic memory, and Ida, the ‘experienced’ woman who believes in spiritualism and Right and Wrong.
First off, there is something wrong with Pinkie. Brought up Catholic, Pinkie is a seventeen-year-old suddenly in charge of a gang of much older men (not dissimilar to the way Trevor in The Destructors insinuates his way into the gang of kids – also on a Bank Holiday). He has no other family to speak of – it’s like he just exists in the way Dracula in the original novel just is. He’s a predator, who tries his best with Rose to act like a normal young man, complimenting her, kissing her, saying all the right things, but if there’s anything inside him at all, it’s just pure hatred for the world and everything in it.
And then there’s Rose, his almost accidental bride. As the closest thing there is to a witness to poor Hale’s murder at the beginning of the book, Rose comes across as naïve and gullible as she’s torn between Good (Ida determined to find justice for her new friend Hale) and Evil (Pinkie, who wants to marry Rose in order to ensure she can’t testify against him). Yet there’s something sharper to her as she becomes Pinkie’s fanatic, willing to defend his actions to Ida because if Pinkie’s going to Hell, Rose will gladly go with him.
Finally, we have Ida, who I find the most interesting. Greene paints her as obviously flawed in terms of her stubbornness and sentimentalism, while her approach to Rose reeks more of condescension and her need for retribution rather than any real concern for the girl. However, she’s clearly a fundamentally good person who is putting her life at risk by trying to find out what happened to a man who she’d only known for a couple of hours.
Setting
Oh, the setting. Such a chef’s kiss. My late father (constantly mentioned on this blog, which he would be so smug about) used to tell me stories of his mother and her siblings being abandoned on various beaches on various Bank Holidays back in the Thirties and every time he did, I would picture the Brighton of Brighton Rock. Greene evokes that balmy, slightly musty world so expertly, from the promenade to the estates.
It's all a bit worse for wear and yet there’s potential in the air: Pinkie has come from nowhere and he’s now a gang leader, Rose is ‘rescued’ from her neglectful parents, the place is packed full of tourists looking for fun and fortune. This is a Brighton that feels heightened enough to complement and complicate all the adolescent, existential angst going on under the pier.
From the South to the East of England
Like Rebecca, Brighton Rock has also had a huge influence on my writing. Thinking about it now, there’s definitely a similar sense of existential dread at times, but my main thoughts were around the setting. I have a real soft spot for British beaches (honestly, the more desolate and run-down the better) and making Coldharbour feel like a real, shabby coastal town was one of my conscious aims when writing.
This is just a little snippet of how I describe Coldharbour:
Alex had lingered, loitered even, at the train station, where she had sat herself down on the least sticky bench and hung onto her suitcase with both of her chill-cracked hands as she stared at the opposite platform, the Coldharbour sign still emblazoned with some faded Fifties illustration of the beach, which, apparently, was all sand and stripy umbrellas and not the fag-ends and the straggly, slimy bits of seaweed that Alex had abandoned a month ago.
And when a bell had chimed five, it galvanised her into action, but with the kind strange automatic force of will that propelled her right past the house and all the way back there.
To the sea.
Not to the house.
To the sea and to blood and to Elizabeth.
