Brighton Rock
A psychological thriller set in
Brighton
Graham Greene
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Brighton Rock |
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UK price: £4.79
US price: $10.20 |
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A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. The boy
gangster Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, who is determined to avenge a death.
Book Description
This nail-biting novel about a teenage gangster exposes the seedy underbelly of the holiday
resort as it was in the thirties, with its shabby bars, and razor gangs fighting for their slice of the protection rackets.
The title 'Brighton Rock' refers to the stick of candy or seaside 'rock'
that reads "Brighton Rock" whoever you break it or bite into it.
In the same way the themes of violence, evil, and the grace of God run
right through the novel. In a sense, as a Catholic, Pinkie, the teenage
thug, cannot escape the hound of heaven that has put his stamp of
ownership into the very essence of his being.
Brighton Rock is the novel in which Greene was more successful than before in adapting his plot to the cliché of melodrama, since the theme of the hunted man emerges in an unambiguous form. There is Pinkie, the boy-gangster on the run from the police and a rival gang, the last-minute rescue of the girl in distress — stock situations conveying the atmosphere of suspense, the terrors of the pursuer and the pursued; and there is even the stock dénouement of melodrama. Nevertheless the reviewers in 1938 were quick to perceive that this was not merely a thriller: while The Times considered it “an interesting novel that is a good deal deeper than an adventure story”, William Plomer in the Spectator commented that we were in for “a murder story and a detective story which is at the same time what may be called a psychological thriller”. While the maladjusted Pinkie is harassed by the police, he is also motivated by his feelings of inferiority and resentment against society.
Charles
Muller, Fiction Studies (McGraw-Hill,
1982), pp.155-6.
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