A reader's response to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Brighton Rock

Optimism in the Bleak World of Brighton Rock

Novelist Graham Greene suffered through a lifetime battling a bipolar disorder that caused him both an intense pressure of depression and a remarkable insight for the darker sight of humanity. So is this demonstrated by the 1938 novel, Brighton Rock, which reflects Greene's penchant for sordid tales of murder, deception and moral dilemma. One of the most immediately striking features of the story is the daring manner in which it toys with conventional ideals concerning morality, tangling a litany of flawed characters and twisted actions with a questions of social imperative, religious obligation and personal affiliation.

At the heart of the novel is Ida Arnold, unique more than anything else for her role as the hero of a violent tale set in the 1930s, an unlikely role for a female protagonist at the time. She is the center of humor and optimism in an otherwise dark world. As Hale becomes wholly aware that Pinkie intends to kill him, the chance encounter with Ida introduces a character with an outlook that juxtaposes that of those around her. When Hale tales her cryptically that is going to die, she tells him, "you aren't that sick. You can't tell me I wouldn't know if you were that sick.' She said. 'I don't like to see a fellow throw up the sponge that way. It's a good world if you don't weaken." (Greene, 19) Though delivered in a humorous exchange this line does function as something of a mission statement for the novel, or at least for Ida.

Otherwise, the novel is driven by dark characters who strike positively bleak moments. The introduction to Pinkie Brown is just such a moment, striking the reader as it does with this portrayal of a figure with some observably despicable quality to him. Greene's iconic detective style writing observes that "the gin slopped out of Hale's glass on to the bar. A boy of about seventeen watched him from the door -- a shabby smart suit, the cloth too thin for much wear, a fact of starved intensity, a kind of hideous and unnatural pride." (Greene, 7) The introduction is fitting and indicates to the reader that Pinkie is not simply a man not to be trusted but that, indeed even beyond that, he is a creature to be feared.

This is only further reinforced in the tense first meeting between Hale and Pinkie, neither of them a man of the greatest particular integrity. Hale insists that the boy have a drink with him, and upon his acceptance of the invitation, Pinkie is described as having "watched Hale all the time closely and with wonder: you might expect a hunter searching through the jungle for some half-fabulous beast to look like that -- at the spotted lion or the pygmy elephant -- before the kill." (Greene, 7)

Quite to this point, we may say that it was probable Hale knew what was coming to him almost from the moment he laid eyes on Pinkie. But it would be inappropriate to call so explicit a description as foreshadowing. Instead, it speaks to the noir literary tendency toward the obviation of violence and the imminence of death. No doubt a product of an era marked on one side by the Great Depression and on the other by World War II, Greene's work channeled fully this idea that the tension was not built on the uncertainty of death but in coming to know the motives of the soon departed.