Why the Sun Burns ~ A Review of Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock"

"People change," she said.
"Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature."

This post is very different from the usual blog fare, mostly because I just came back from a trip and that I'm getting my daily word count whipped back into shape. It's going good! So for now I wanted to talk about a book I read recently, slightly different from the usual pulp material I go over here. However it's not as different as you might think. This is about Graham Greene's Brighton Rock from 1938.

For those not in the know, Graham Greene was one of the most well known writers of the 20th century. He wrote many books, plays, and scripts for film noir, including the legendary movie The Third Man which is regarded as a classic. He wrote from the 1930s up to the 80s before his death in the early 90s. So he doesn't need any introduction here.

What probably isn't well known is that he was also a Catholic, though admittedly not a very good one, particularly later in life. His depression certainly didn't help, but neither did cheating on his wife throughout his life on top of it. He would later call himself a Catholic agnostic, and if you read his works you would understand the philosophical battles are what he is about, whether in his pulp thrillers or his literary output. He was a man of contradictions. But one book bridged that gap of extremes admirably and that book is the subject of this post, 1938's Brighton Rock.

It might be a surprise to readers of this blog, but I do like literary fiction. But I enjoy a very specific kind of literary fiction: ones that deal with the eternal and the knife edge between life and death. It's the same as a pulp tale of white hat versus black hat except the sides are above the players who scrambling to understand which they belong to. It's a different angle, but one that never gets old.

This is why I've greatly enjoyed Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Shusaku Endo's Silence, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. They are all tales of good and evil and deal with bigger themes beyond the usual literary fiction trope of nothing happening while things go on. They are about what matters, just as pulp stories are.

Of course, I also like tales of two-fisted action and clear stakes to entertain the reader as well as the above. To me, these two sides of the fiction coin are pretty similar. They both offer the same thing: praising the good and rejecting the evil, and understanding the distinction between the two, even though they do it in different ways.

Brighton Rock is a sequel to the writer's earlier thriller A Gun For Sale, but only tangentially. An event that occurred in that book is the reason the main character is in the position he is in by the this story's start. You don't need to read it to understand this one, but it is to be mentioned.

The story stars a seventeen year old gangster named Pinkie Brown who has just seized control of his gang. At the book's start he is hunting down a man named Charles Hale who betrayed them. Charles meets a woman named Ida Arnold who he connects with, but the two soon separate and Charles is killed by Pinkie afterwards. The report on Charles' death seems strange to Ida so she begins investigating on a lark and an intuition and ends up badgering Pinkie throughout the story even without any evidence about his guilt or knowledge about his person. At the same time Pinkie courts a young waitress named Rose in an attempt to marry her so she can't testify against him since she unknowingly can bust his alibi. The three and their motivations clash throughout the story. As the novel goes on everything begins to unravel until the truth wins out at the end. Everyone gets what they wanted, in a way.

What makes this story work are the characters. They are a extremely different from each other, but vital for the story to go the way it does.

Pinkie is the main character, and he is a villain, through and through. He has no warmth in his heart, no humor, no love, and deliberately chooses to be that way. He wants to be damned. There are several points of the book where small acts of grace such as a friend turning up alive who was thought to be dead are outright rejected by Pinkie who lashes out in vicious ways. He is given chance after chance and rejects them all.

His obsession with being a man informed by a dead gangster causes him to routinely champion the wrong things, from turning on potential allies to threatening those who have nothing to offer him to rejecting offers that would aid him. By the end of the book his soul is stretched so thin that there is little left beyond a husk of what was once a smart young man who could be so much more, but refuses to be.

Greene only ever calls Pinkie "the Boy" throughout the narration and only uses "Pinkie" when being spoken to in dialogue to emphasize the state of his mind. Pinkie has rejected humanity for his own private version of success, and has no chance to become anything more than a mere child. This is despite his countless chances to do so.

The other main character is Rose, who could be seen as the real counterpart to Pinkie. She loves him, not for any schoolgirl reason, but because she thinks she is damned and therefore perfect for him. They are a match, and if they were smarter about it they could work, but they aren't and they don't. Rose knows this, but refuses to admit it. There is no hope for them, but at least they can burn together. Or so she believes.

You see, both Pinkie and Rose are Catholics, but Pinkie only believes in Hell and damnation as an inevitability and can't even picture a Heaven or mercy in the slightest. Rose believes in both but can''t see herself being redeemed and thinks she's destined for Hell. She goes to Mass and he hasn't gone in forever, and they both believe it's all true. His religion is a shell of the real thing morphed to suit his crafted personality, and hers is a young girl's misunderstanding of the nature of Hell and salvation.

This difference in their outlook is what makes Rose more sympathetic as the frail girl struggling to get by. By the end of the story we learn why she thought she should be damned and why her misguided thoughts had very nearly given her that wish. At the same time she vows to start anew with hope for the future with a new understanding of how the world is. Perhaps anyone can be saved, if they want it. In my opinion, she is the real protagonist of the story. She is only held back by her naivety of the way things are.

Finally, there is Ida Arnold. She is supposed to be the "detective" character, but she isn't really. Ida is a hedonist, to put it bluntly. She is just about every New Age, chubby, middle-aged, cat lady, secularist, stereotype you can think of. She's a know-it-all, loose, loud, and surprisingly clueless. If Pinkie wasn't in this story she would be the most unlikable character--and there are gangsters in this work. Ida is only interesting for how Greene uses her as a place of unexpected grace and deliverance in the plot over the others in it. Otherwise her obliviousness around younger characters can get irritating.

She knows right is right, and wrong is wrong, even though she is very much a hedonist who makes bad decision in her own life, but she doesn't know why of everything and can't even explain it. She lectures Rose for being naive, even though she is far more naive than she is despite the age difference. For instance, a big gangster threatens Pinkie sends men after his guys and viciously attacks them, but Ida doesn't know this and thinks the gangster is an upstanding and right man. Despite this she can nail when someone isn't acting right or is hiding something from her. This is more or less Ida's character. She is frequently right, but not for the reasons she think she is and can miss the forest for the trees. She doesn't even understand it herself.

Ida ends up in the right place at the right time seemingly at random, through her connections and goofy larks. This puts her in places she wouldn't otherwise have any reason to be. It's her boisterous and warm personality that contrasts with Pinkie's cold one that leads her to push back against him even though they don't know each other at all. By the end of the story the preceding events begin to rub off on her and leads her to making the first good decision for her own life she made the entire story. Perhaps she actually has grown through the events.

These three are almost as direct opposites of each other as can be, but they all drive the plot perfectly. The triumvirate of clashing ideals is what makes the story interesting beyond the scam plotline. Whenever one of the three is on page you will pay attention as they all have much charisma around them that makes you want to see what they will do next. I was also partial to the charactersof  the gangsters such as Spicer, Dallow, and Cubit, who all represent sides of Pinkie he simply doesn't have, and yet are all he has left.

Greene contrasts the beauty and ugliness of the (then) modern world through the eyes of both religious and secular and how they are both two sides of a certain denarius. What might be ugly or beautiful for another might only look that way because the full picture isn't being seen. The wrong thing is glorified over and over by characters in this novel while the right thing is avoided as a vampire dodges the sun. This never turns out well for those involved. The moral order of the universe is held up, as it should in all good fiction.

Brighton Rock is about the importance of grace and the acceptance of reality, both religious and secular. It is about growth. Those who deny reality are doomed to destruction as their souls shrivel to nothing as they attempt to escape into themselves. You can't change, or grow, as long as you refuse to accept Truth. At the end you either pick a side or you will be thrown into one, and it won't always be the better option.

It's a short book, as it should be, clocking in a good bit under 300 pages, and very little space is wasted with flowery prose. This isn't a book that would come out of Oldpub today, and it isn't just because of length.

The prose is lean and sharp like a pulp novel, though the action is not on the surface. Everything ripples under the water. However, there is a giant knife fight between gangsters that explodes out of nowhere in the middle of the book which is terrifying, and yet leads to one beautiful moment of grace that seals the fates of our characters. It's a perfect scene that leads to another perfect scene. The action in litfic is always about the consequences of decisions, and the battle between God and Satan as the ultimate white and black hat is where the real action sits in this piece.

Once you see Brighton Rock as what it is: a spiritual battle between mortal sin and repentance, it is engrossing all the way until the final moments. As far as litfic goes, this was pretty much my ideal example. It surpassed my expectations despite reading about its reputation for so long.

I can't convince you to give this a try if you don't enjoy film noir, spiritual battles, or litfic, but I can recommend it wholeheartedly all the same. There isn't really any other book out there like this, not even by Greene.

But I enjoyed this one immensely and will stand by it as a work worth reading. Brighton Rock is not like anything else you will read today, especially from the dinosaur publishing world.

If this is your sort of thing be sure to seek it out.