‘Brighton Rock’ Asks: Is Anyone Beyond Saving?
‘Brighton Rock’, by Graham Greene, reviewed.
The third of Graham Greene’s ‘Catholic novels’ opens with a quotation from Charles Péguy: ‘The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.’ Fittingly, the story begins with a murder. Charles ‘Fred’ Hale, a reporter visiting Brighton for an assignment, is hunted down and killed by Pinkie Brown, the teenage leader of a local gang. Pinkie murders Hale out of vengeance, for Hale exposed the slot machine racket in which his gang, then under different leadership, was involved. To cover up the murder, Pinkie commits further crimes, which leads him to Rose, an unworldly waitress with the power to destroy his alibi. Like Pinkie, she is Catholic; unlike him, she can conceive of good.
Greene sets Pinkie’s religious evil against secular good, which is embodied in Ida Arnold, a moral but atheistic woman, who meets Fred Hale while he is fleeing Pinkie’s gang. Out of moral outrage and concern for Rose, who is by now in a twisted relationship with Pinkie, she decides to find out what happened to Fred and to bring his murderer to justice.
Greene sets Pinkie’s religious evil against secular good.
Brighton Rock’s central question is whether there is any hope of redemption for someone like Pinkie. His ‘ribs [are] like steel bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance’: he is unable to comprehend the idea of good in any emotional sense. But because of his faith, he knows the difference between right and wrong. And Greene suggests that there is hope for Pinkie. He Greene suggests that there is hope for Pinkie. He is pursued not just by Ida but by what the poet Francis Thompson called the ‘Hound of Heaven’ — a Holy Spirit who is restless to forgive, or, to borrow from Golding’s Pincher Martin, ‘mercilessly compassionate’. At times this idea seems to take on physical form: as a ‘beast’ with ‘gigantic wings’.
Pinkie is pursued not just by Ida but by what the poet Francis Thompson called the ‘Hound of Heaven’.
The technical problem posed by the novel is interesting. How to see the world through the eyes of someone incapable of understanding it? Bret Easton Ellis solved this problem by rendering experience as wholly superficial in American Psycho. Greene is also forced to find a way to sustain the pace and tension demanded of a thriller while ‘challenging God in the cause of the damned’, as Péguy put it. At its best, the narrative zips along, indulging Greene’s theological questions as well as his dislike of popular culture. As for rendering Pinkie believably, what Greene succeeds in communicating is lack — a kind of hollowness underscored by Pinkie’s drawn, hungry features.
Greene show his talent for asking big questions without weakening what is something not too far from being a pot-boiler — something certain filmmakers have not even tried to do in their adaptations of his novel. For this reason, more than any other of his books, Brighton Rock typifies both ‘entertainment’, as Greene described his thrillers, and serious Catholic novel, a distinction which became less clear as Greene’s career ran on. For that reason, it is the obvious place to start reading him.
