What I Am Reading: "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene

I’ve been reading Graham Greene because there’s a new biography of him out. A review that I read notes Brighton Rock as one of his books influenced by his Catholic beliefs, one where religion “is raised to a roiling boil.” I selected this one and A Gun for Sale because they are distantly related: Raven’s first murder, that of a gang leader (before his recruitment as an international assassin) has repercussions for the penny-ante gang in question, as it is taken over by Pinky. Pinky is a seventeen-year-old asexual sociopath who is losing ground against much bigger and more legitimate gangsters in the weekend seaside town of Brighton, a tacky boardwalk, racetrack, and prefabricated vacation house area where Londoners travel for a weekend.

The story starts with Pinky et gang’s revenge against a newspaperman who was involved in their former leader’s death. This journalist’s occupation is a quaint relic of yesteryear’s amusements: his paper publishes his itinerary of travel through popular tourist destinations, and anyone who confronts him on the street with the right nonsense phrase (or finds one of the cards he leaves behind in each location) wins a prize. This was apparently a real thing, in Britain at least.

Anyway, Pinky’s band needs to make sure that his scheduled placements along his route are checked off to throw investigators off of his time of death; but when Pinky goes to check on the card placement by one of his more incompetent members he is caught red-handed by a young waitress, and her recollection of his suspicious activity makes her a liability. This sets Pinky off on a long cover-up as he ends up having to eliminate the weak links in his tiny gang and marry the waitress, so that she cannot testify against him.

Fortunately for Pinky, this is a good deal for her. Unfortunately for Pinky, he is terrified of sex, a fear rooted in his poverty (you can imagine things in a single-room house) and his religious upbringing. He hates the simple, trusting girl that he is stuck with, even as she loves him fiercely for liberating her from her life of poverty and drudgery. She would rather be damned with him than saved by anyone else, even though the thought of living with her, the jibes of his gang members and other underworld friends, and her reminder of the same under-class upbringing he “overcame,” cause him nothing but revulsion.

And there is someone trying to save her: the journalist’s memory is upheld by Ida Arnold, a local vacationer whom he tried to pick up for comfort during his final, desperate flight through the resort town. Ida is a simple, middle-class, middle-aged woman who is driven by a simple sense of right and wrong, and wishes to invoke “an eye for an eye” over the journalist’s sad, overlooked death, ruled to be of natural causes. She is also Pinky’s sexual opposite: twice his age, she maintains an active love life with an endless array of sad, somewhat pathetic middle-aged men, and is generally filed with the color and lust for life that Pinky and his eventual-wife, Rose, lack in their constant furtiveness and shabbiness. The two hate her for this, though the hatred is also mixed up with understandable class resentment.

The entire town is shabby, in fact, from the boardwalk to the restaurants to the unfinished bungalows placed along the seaside cliffs. Other than Ida’s presence, it’s a pretty dark book, as any minor step toward happiness or acceptance that Pinky takes is quickly overwhelmed by his inner blankness, suspicion, and viciousness. He tries to manipulate Rose’s devotion into a “suicide pact” that he will walk away from after she goes first, unable to face “sixty years” of unwanted domestic life. Pinky’s current life isn’t exactly some beacon of boyish freedom, though, as he lives in a rooming house with his beleaguered gang as the upscale competition makes it clear that there is no place in the town, Pinky’s only natural environment, for their second-rate protection racket. Just a grim book all around, with a sad ending.