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Title: Brighton Rock (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0-14-018492-9 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.48 (21 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Learning to Play 'The Brutish Game'
Comment: I have said it before, and shall say it again - Graham Greene was incapable of writing a bad novel! "Brighton Rock" is yet another miraculous triumph of setting, plot, characterization, thematic unity and everything that makes novels worth reading. In addition, Greene's use of Catholicism and common-sense ethics as coexistent ideologies behind the story, guiding the main characters, gives the novel considerable philosophical weight. One great thing about "Brighton Rock" is that the characters' internal struggles are not simply reducible to good v. evil or right v. wrong, but are asked to distinguish between these two systems.
"Brighton Rock" has two protagonists - Pinkie Brown is a teenage gangster, trying to prove his manhood and establish himself as a serious force in the Brighton underworld. Ida Arnold is a healthy, flirtatious, and determined woman who cannot be dissuaded from any purpose. When corrupt newspaperman Charles Hale is killed by Pinkie's gang, Ida's momentary acquaintance with Hale on a Bank Holiday leads her to pursue the truth surrounding his death. The conflict between Pinkie, who falls into a Calvinist-Catholic defeatism, and Ida, who believes in right and Hammurabian justice(an eye for an eye) shapes the rest of the novel.
Human sexuality and relationships are important facets of "Brighton Rock." Pinkie and Rose, two young Catholics raised in a run-down, predominantly 'Roman' housing project - constantly struggle with maturity, responsibility, and human physicality. While they view sex as 'mortal sin,' Ida, their pursuer, sees it as 'natural,' and celebratory of life. The complex relationship between Pinkie and the equally young and innocent Rose adds further purpose to Ida's mission.
Minor characters like the anemic Spicer, the loyal Dallow, the brusque Cubitt, and the literary lawyer Prewitt, along with Rose's 'moody' parents and his own eternally copulating parents, all complicate Pinkie's inner turmoil - and reveal that Pinkie's supposed manhood is a veil for his inherent weakness and inexperience.
Greene's wealth of literary knowledge also adds texture to the novel as a whole. References to Shakespeare, the 18th century actor and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber, Romantic-era poets like Keats and Wordsworth, Victorian literature (Dickens' "David Copperfield"), and modern magazines and motion pictures casts the novel against a history of British literature. Overall, "Brighton Rock" is typical Greene - expertly written and philosophically provocative.
Rating: 5
Summary: Graham Greene at his extraordinary best!
Comment: Brighton Rock is the first Graham Greene book I read, and after buying all his books, this is still my favourite. I'm English by birth, and know Brighton well, and I am ever impressed by the evocation of a place exactly as I remember it. I find Pinky a truly disturbing character, and his Rose one of the most sad yet courageous heroines in modern literature. Mr. Greene is so good at drawing "small part" characters, and recreates so well the world of the petty criminal, and the unpleasant, hopeless characters who inhabit it. I have always felt Graham Greene to be the master of the written English language - his books contain neither one word more, nor one word less than they need to. Definitely my favourite author, and this my favourite of his considerable body of work.
Rating: 4
Summary: Hard Candy
Comment: BRIGHTON ROCK
To oversimplify perhaps, 16-year-old innocent Rose and the 17-year-old Puritanical killer Pinkie represent a Christian version of good and evil-they're almost walking personifications of it. Ida Arnold is the secular world, and in an ordinary melodrama, she would be the hero, because she is the one who persists to see that justice is done.
But Greene's view of Ida is that she is morally superficial, and doesn't understand real good and evil, that is, good and evil with eternal consequences. Pinkie is a nominally Catholic but really Calvinist psychopath, more convinced of the existence of Hell than that of Heaven. Since he knows that Hell is his destination, he can only hope to live here in the posh manner of the big-time gangster Colleoni, Pinkie's rival.
The average watcher/reader of American melodramas would probably be disconcerted by Greene's undercutting of the nominal hero Ida, who is all for truth, justice, and the English way. Her antagonists are not only Pinkie, but also Rose, whom Ida sees herself as protecting. But Rose prefers Pinkie.
The world in which these characters move is the Brit resort Brighton, whose rock candy had the word "Brighton" embedded throughout the stick. It is a world of vacationing typists stenos, and clerks, and is permanently inhabited by seedy grifters and race-track touts. Largely to extort money from betting enterprises, two gangs compete in a protection racket. But Pinkie's operation (he took over for the former leader, who was murdered by Colleoni) is a pathetic imitation of the smooth operation of the larger "mob."
Green's writing style is semi-Hemingwayesque, hard-boiled with brusque dialogue and jump cuts between scenes. The characters all have their signatures-Pinkie's inadequate shoulders and throbbing cheek, Rose's mousiness and bony frame, and Ida's unmaternal but pneumatic breasts. And the minor characters are individualized; for example, there's Colleoni's small-framed pudginess and the detail that Pinkie fixates on, the gold crowns on the red-upholstered chairs in his hotel apartment.
I believe this is the first novel in which Greene's Catholicism was obtrusive, something he got away from in later work like THE QUIET AMERICAN and THE COMEDIANS.
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Title: The Heart of the Matter (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140283323 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The End of the Affair (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184953 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Power and the Glory (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Graham Greene, John Updike ISBN: 0142437301 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Comedians (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184945 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185003 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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