2008 books

[peteryoung]

77) Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, 1938  ( RE-READ )
Sometimes your most honest appraisal of a story can be found in the first words you say to yourself when you finish it: in this case mine were "That was, again, a fantastic book." I last read this in 1975 for my English Lit. 'O' Level, and remember thinking I would like to read it once more, but next time not for study. Greene doesn't put a foot wrong in his story of the downfall of Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the streets of 1930s Brighton, after he commits one murder too many. Greene's getting under the skin of Pinkie is a truly class act in characterisation, equally so his nemesis, the formidably convincing Ida Arnold, who gets to the root of things with the small help of a ouija board and plenty of female intuition. There's something quintessentially British about it all, with everyone trapped in their own circumstantial worlds and their lives intersecting in ways that can't help but point back to their own individual loneliness. How Greene does this I'm not so sure, and in fact to analyse that some more would take away much of the pleasure: Greene can dazzle you with his writing here, if you let him. Brighton Rock is also a very catholic novel about life, with Pinkie being a defiant exception to whatever rules life may have, his come-uppance conveyed in his refusal to countenance that 'there's always room between the stirrup and the ground', even when time is at its most short. A benchmark of a novel, not least in my own reading life, and one that still makes a particularly hard-hitting impression.

Comments

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

Anything by Greene is worth reading, but Brighton Rock is especially good. He managed to write very Catholic novels that could speak to atheists just as effectively as to Catholics.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I meant catholic more with a small c, as in 'all-embracing', but I also think Greene's choice of Catholicism for Pinkie and Rose was a perfectly judged element to the story.

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

I always think of Greene as a quintessentially Catholic, as in Roman Catholic, author. He might not have been a conventional Catholic, but that element is there is just about all his books. Issues like grace, original sin, redemption, our relationship to God, etc, but somehow he managed to do it without the end result sounding like a religious tract. I can't think of any other author so obsessed with Christian religion who was able to deal with those issues without alienating non-Christian readers. Compare him to G. K. Chesterton, who always comes across as sermonising.

[grytpype-thynne.livejournal.com]

Pace other comments: I only think of him as catholic with a capital C towards the end of his life, but your telling phrase "one murder too many" carries a marvelous implicit idea that might inhabit the mind of more recent and famous couple who converted to the faith that there are exists a legitimate number of deaths one might cause in the pursuit of some higher goal that goes to the essence of Greene before his faith consumed him.

I suspect this is for you what American Tabloid (Ellroy) is to me: a moralising yet thrilling narrative with some prose that stuns.