Brighton Rock by Graham Greene | book word Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Lobby Lud, the man from the News Chronicle was a perpetual disappointment in my youth. If you spotted Lobby Lud, you were supposed to strike him on the shoulder with a copy of the News Chronicle and say, ‘You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £5’. But he never appeared in my home town in South Wales and on the occasion he came to Newport we did not. The paper ceased publication in October 1960 when my chance disappeared for ever. Why read this novel? I picked up Brighton Rock from my TBR pile because I needed a thin book to read on the train. It was on the pile as a classic to re-read. I was immediately rewarded with the brilliant opening paragraph of the novel. Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the seam the holiday crowd.

They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something or the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky. (5) This opening paragraph is acclaimed for setting up the novel’s violence, tension, and the place and time of its events. The first sentence is apparently contradicted by the picture of Brighton on a Whitsun holiday. But we know at once that Hale is doomed. Brighton Beach on Whitsun, 31 May 2009. By David Hawgood of Geography Project via Wiki Commons. I am working on the revision of the first draft of my novel. So I read the most acclaimed novels with attention. Graham Greene was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and this is one of several of his novels classed as classics. There is one major novelistic problem for me in Brighton Rock.

For this story to work we have to believe in several unlikely aspects of the characters. We have to believe that, knowing his life was in danger Hale would not try to escape; that Pinkie, only 17 years old, would go as far as he does; that Ida really cares enough about a man she barely knew to pursue the truth and put her own life in danger; that Rose is as innocent, stupid and gullible as she acts. None of these are givens, but there would be no story without them. The story We are in the late 1930s. You may be visualising the Boulting Brothers 1947 film, which starred Richard Attenborough as Pinkie and Hermione Badderly as Ida Arnold. (The more recent film has not made a big impression.) That rather pasty face, with its scar and huge eyes, a baby face with the eyes of a mean old man, this is the Pinkie of the novel and 1947 film. Good and evil were themes in the air in the late ‘30s and through the 40s, the time of the Second World War. And they are themes for all times.

Graham Greene was a Roman Catholic and embraced these themes. The orthodox Roman church is not the hero of this novel. Rather it is the wholesome goodness of Ida Arnold, (almost a tart with a heart of gold). Pinkie’s evil is set against Ida’s humanity. Lobby Lud lives on in Killey Kibber, aka Fred Hale, a journalist with the Messenger, in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. He is in Brighton to leave his cards (finders could claim 10/-) and be ready to be challenged by a member of the public. Pinkie, the Boy, is 17 and trying to assert himself as the leader of a violent gang in Brighton by stepping into the shoes of Kite, slashed in the waiting room at St Pancras station in London. Pinkie organises Hale’s murder, because the journalist exposed gangs in Brighton and is on Killey Kibber duty in Brighton that Whitsun holiday. Pinkie is conscious that if caught he will not hang because he is a minor. But the gang do not lay the false trail according to his directions and in putting this right he meets 16-year old waitress Rose.

She is a potential witness and Pinkie has to marry her so that she will not be able to testify against him. But he becomes so revolted by the idea of being tied to her he plans her murder as well. Brighton West Pier October 2009. By Lars Olsson via Wiki Commons As the story progresses Pinkie finds that the more violent he becomes, the more he compromises himself with everyone, including of course his God. Meanwhile his hold on his gang diminishes in the face of his rival Mr Corleoni. Evil will get its just desserts. Ida Arnold, who likes a good time, was friendly with Hale, and she suspects foul play and injustice when she finds he has died. She sets out to find the truth which brings her into conflict with Pinkie. She also tries to rescue Rose but the girl has never received any attention before and is determined to do what Pinkie wants. Why do we care? Of course we want Pinkie’s plans to fail. But we also have some sympathy for Pinkie and Rose, they are young and naïve and come from impoverished backgrounds. Pinkie has no concept of any one else’s experiences and feelings. Consequently, he is very dangerous.

Although Pinkie is evil, he experiences fear and frustration as his plans unravel. For example when he is tricked and cut at the races. The poverty of Rose’s parent’s house and of her upbringing are stark. This is the scene when Pinkie goes to get permission for their marriage from her father. There was only one door and a staircase matted with old newspapers. On the bottom step between the mud marks stared up the tawny child face of Violet Crow violated and buried under the West Pier in 1936. He opened the door and there beside the black kitchen stove with cold dead charcoal on the floor sat the parents. They had a mood on : a small thin elderly man, his face marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and patience and suspicion : the woman middle-aged, stupid, vindictive. The dishes hadn’t been washed and the stove hadn’t been lit. ‘They got a mood,’ Rose said aloud to him. ‘They wouldn’t let me do a thing. Not even light the fire. I like a clean house, honest I do. Ours wouldn’t be like this.’ ‘Look here, Mr -.’ The Boy said. ‘Wilson,’ Rose said. ‘Wilson.

I want to marry Rose. It seems as she’s so young I got to get your permission.’ They wouldn’t answer him. They treasured their mood as if it was a bright piece of china only they possessed : something they could show to neighbours as ‘mine’. (141-2) The childish mood persists until Pinkie offers 15 guineas for Rose. It is accepted. Poverty, violence, inadequacy, ignorance, mean-spiritedness – all these in so few lines. Following the civil ceremony they wander at a loss around Brighton until they return to Pinkie’s lodgings. Finally he graduates in the last human shame (sexual consummation of the marriage) and now he believes he could face anyone. Both young people have been raised as ‘Romans’ and because their marriage is not solemnised in church, they are aware they have committed a mortal sin. Now they are lost they go on to plan more mortal sins. The references to the church are to not to everyone’s taste, but this novel is an excellent thriller and raises important questions relevant to all beliefs and all times.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938) Penguin pp247 (Page references are to the 1977 Penguin edition). How do you react to this classic? Is it a book you would re-read? To ensure you are notified of future blogposts please subscribe to email notifications by entering your email address in the box. London School of Journalism | Graham Greene: Brighton Rock Essay Archive Graham Greene: Brighton Rock She . . . was about to mutter her quick 'Our Father' and 'Hail Marys' while she dressed, when she remembered . . . What was the good of praying now? . . . she had chosen her side: if they damned him they'd got to damn her, too 'Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him'. This powerful and sinister sentence is the opening line of Brighton Rock and the start of a gripping thriller. Part One of the novel, despite Greene's later concerns that it should have been removed, sets the scene and introduces the two main protagonists, Ida and Pinkie (initially referred to as 'the boy' - it is not until Chapter Two that he takes on the role of main character and becomes 'the Boy').

However, from Part Two onwards, it is quickly apparent that the novel is not just a murder mystery but also addresses metaphysical issues of Good versus Evil and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The two opposing characters in the 'Good versus Evil' struggle are Pinkie and Ida. It is interesting and ironic that the evil Pinkie is the 'Roman'. He nurtures vice, although he realises, after his first taste of alcohol that 'You could lose vice as easily as you could lose virtue', and chooses Hell over Heaven: 'Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust'. Pinkie is appalled at the idea of sexual contact: 'a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness . . . He felt desire move again, like nausea in the belly'. This is partly a result of having watched his parents' weekly sexual activities while he was a child. In order to consummate his marriage he needs to tell both Rose and himself that they are committing a mortal sin because they were not married in church. It's a mortal sin, he said, getting what savour there was out of innocence, trying to taste God in the mouth . . . he blotted everything out in a sad brutal now-or-never embrace.

Pinkie also comes to believe that Hell is all around him, it is part of his life. He is responsible for two murders, and is compelled to marry Rose to prevent her from giving evidence. On his wedding night he looks around his room from his bed, no longer alone and no longer celibate: '(he had graduated in the last human shame): This was hell then . . . it was just his old familiar room'. Mr Prewitt, the lawyer, confirms this when Pinkie visits him: 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it'. Ida on the other hand is not a church-goer: 'life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped'. When Rose talks of confession and repentance, she replies 'That's just religion'. Then later, 'I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong'. Ida is much more comfortable with intimate relations and, although she describes herself as a bit free and easy, believes sex is part of human nature and just a bit of fun.

She loves life and embraces it fully: Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, Ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post . . . Death shocked her, life was so important. The two characters are opposites in other ways: Pinkie is young (seventeen), thin and introverted. Ida is late thirties or early forties, large and ebullient. She is superstitious. Pinkie prides himself on not being, or trying not to be, superstitious: 'If I was one of those crazy geezers who touch wood, throw salt, won't go under ladders'. Ida is confident, popular and not afraid to stick to her own views even when friends try to talk her out of something. As the net closes in on Pinkie, Phil Corkery is tiring of the intrigue and wants to leave well alone: 'Don't you think, Ida, we've done enough . . . We've done our best. It's a matter for the police or no one'. But Ida will not give up; it is not just her sense of fairness but the sense of excitement: 'I don't say it hasn't been - exciting . . .

What's the harm in that?' Pinkie is not driven by self-confidence - almost the opposite. He was a bully at school, always trying to prove he was tougher than another child. He has not changed. He is very concerned about how people view him and when he believes neither Colleoni nor the police take him seriously, he becomes very bitter: The poison twisted in the Boy's veins. He had been insulted. He had to show someone he was - a man. His only thought after his first sexual encounter is not of the pleasure but that 'he had exposed himself and nobody had laughed'. He is driven by a need to feel safe. When he believes Spicer has been killed by Colleoni's men, his 'thoughts inevitably came back with a sense of relief . . . It was impossible to repent of something which made him safe'. If he could acknowledge one weakness, it would be the effect of music on his emotions - music could make him cry, but rather than admit this he would walk away from the music or leave a cinema. Pinkie is sadistic.

He wants to rip a plaster off Spicer's cheek to see the wound open, he pinches Rose's wrist until it hurts, and, on their first date, threatens her with the acid he regularly carries. Ida, by way of contrast, on leaving Frank's place, gives money to a little boy she does not know - she possessed an innate kindness. In summary, Ida is confident, irreligious but determined to do what is right, while Pinkie, the Catholic, is determined to be damned. As Rose's confessor says at end of the book, 'a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone'. It is perhaps surprising then that Green was known as a 'Catholic writer' and not an 'Anti-Catholic writer'. Ida takes on the role of avenging angel. Following leads from the newspaper she meets Molly, the girl Hale tried to pick up on the beach. After their conversation Ida is convinced of foul play.

In addition, the word PHIL comes out of a session with the Board and Ida believes this refers to an acquaintance, Phil Corkery (usually referred to as Mr Corkery to distinguish him from the characters of the underworld such as Dallow and Cubitt who are never given a title) who, coincidentally, has invited her to Brighton. She returns to Brighton determined to discover the truth behind Hale's death. She goes to Snow's and meets Rose who inadvertently tells Ida that it was not Hale who left the Kolley Kibber card by saying the man who left it ordered Bass, a beer Hale does not drink. The investigation has begun and Ida is further spurred on by Black Boy, Hale's horse racing tip, winning first place. This allows her to afford a longer stay in Brighton - perhaps luck, or divine intervention on the side of Good? Through her determination, Ida gathers information and pieces together the plot. Pinkie's limited imagination would never allow him to understand how a stranger could persist in this way; he does not understand other people's feelings. Only when he feels cornered does he begin to see a need to understand other people: Other people's feelings bored at his brain: he had never before felt this desire to understand.

Pinkie's lifestyle, religion and personality take him into a downward spiral of multiple murder and ultimately his own death. Ida's irreligious love of life gives her the strength and courage to fight for Good. Good wins over Evil. Other characters contribute to the plot. Phil Corkery gives Ida the excuse she needs to return to Brighton, acquaintances in Brighton give her information about Colleoni, and Old Crowe sits with her at the board. Spicer's nervousness leads to Pinkie's second murder and Colleoni highlights Pinkie's bleak lifestyle but also provides his role model. Dallow and Cubitt are important not only as part of the gang but also to help understand the type of people who live in Pinkie's world; Cubitt likes cheap seaside jokes and drinks heavily, Dallow is having an affair with Frank's wife. Rose's role in the battle between Good and Evil is, in many ways, the most interesting. She initially appears to be the opposite of Pinkie - a good Catholic who says her prayers, attends mass, confesses and hopes for heaven. She reminds Pinkie too much of his own background as they are from the same part of town and Pinkie has ambitions to move on like Colleoni.

However, he reluctantly recognises that he needs Rose: He was aware that she belonged to his life, like a room or a chair: she was something which completed him . . . What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn't get along without goodness. So Rose represents a good which completes Pinkie's evil, in contrast to Ida who represents good fighting evil. She is, in many ways, the link between the two, a connection between Good and Evil. Her memory for faces allows her to deduce that Hale did not leave the Kolley Kibber card at Snow's. She passes this information to Ida. But it is also this memory that turns her into a threat to Pinkie, forcing him to marry her to prevent her testifying against him. Rose, in her naivety, wants to believe that Pinkie loves her, and becomes his most loyal supporter, even though she suspects he is a murderer: I love you, Pinkie. I don't care what you do. I love you for ever. Ida sees the good in Rose and wants to save her from Pinkie, and Rose is part of Ida's motivation for continuing her quest.

But Rose has convinced herself that Pinkie loves her and wouldn't do her any harm. She has, through her association with Pinkie, lost some of her goodness. She is loyal to a murderer. Some of her Catholic beliefs have slipped away and she is not ashamed of committing a 'mortal sin' - sleeping with Pinkie without a church wedding. The morning after the wedding, she wakes up in Pinkie's room: She . . . was about to mutter her quick "Our Father" and "Hail Marys" while she dressed, when she remembered . . . What was the good of praying now? . . . she had chosen her side: if they damned him they'd got to damn her, too. Rose is absorbed into Pinkie's life to such an extent that she appears willing to commit the ultimate sin, suicide, so that they will both go to Hell together. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn't damn him without damning her too. There was nothing he could do, she wouldn't do: she felt capable of sharing any murder . . . she wouldn't let him go into that darkness alone.

It never occurs to Rose that Pinkie would not kill himself after she is dead. She takes the gun that Pinkie has given her and he leaves her alone in the car. She begins to doubt but pushes the doubts aside: 'If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil - he tempted her to virtue like a sin'. Pinkie's influence is apparent here as this thought reflects Pinkie's own view stated earlier: 'You could lose vice as easily as you could lose virtue'. She picks up the gun but Ida, Dallow and a policeman arrive just in time. In the ensuing struggle, Pinkie's face is burned with his own vitriol: she saw his face - steam . . . He looked half his size, doubled up in appalling agony: it was as if the flames had literally got him. So Pinkie achieves his ultimate goal and dies in the fires of Hell. Ida feels vindicated, she has solved the puzzle and saved Rose but the experience has changed her - perhaps she has had enough adventure and excitement. She goes home to ask the Board if she should return to her husband and possibly to a more traditionally accepted 'good' lifestyle without the amorous adventures.

Rose lives in a grey middle ground between Ida and Pinkie, where good and evil coexist. She is good enough to believe in Pinkie's love, but weak enough to follow him onto the evil path he has chosen for himself. She goes to confession, still believing Pinkie loved her and wanting to be damned. She condemns both Ida and the priest for suggesting he did not. She has been drawn into a world of evil but did it for Pinkie's love. In her confusion and distress, the reader can barely imagine her horrified reaction when she listens to the gramophone record and learns the truth. © Sarah Jones August 2004 "Just wanted to say, once again, a big thank you for all the time and effort you spent with me; encouraging and helping me to develop my poetry." Clare C "I will have no hesitation in recommending LSJ courses to friends as an excellent way to make a start with some focused writing." Clare H "I want to continue my work with my tutor! I have nothing but praise for her!

She truly understands every difficulty I have faced so far." Gabriel S Brighton Rock Summary - eNotes.com Brighton Rock Summary link Link In his introduction, Graham Greene notes that Brighton Rock “began as a detective novel,” but readers and critics of the work soon realize that in the development of the central character, Pinkie Brown, and in the reversal of the hunt for the victim, Fred Hale, Greene has provided yet another of his studies of evil, sin, and the “appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” Against the lively backdrop of a Bank Holiday, which brings happy tourists to the seaside resort, Greene presents the frightened Fred Hale. The first words establish the terror: “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” Hale, known as Kolly Kibber in a popular newspaper, has been hired to leave cards at various places so that readers who recognize him can claim a prize. Instead, he is recognized by Pinkie, who seeks revenge for Hale’s betrayal of Pinkie’s mentor (and father figure), Kite. The first hunt is under way.

Although Hale seeks refuge in Ida Arnold’s Earth Mother arms, Pinkie and his gang find him as he waits for Ida to come out of the lavatory. Seeking to establish an alibi, Pinkie has Spicer, one of his gang, leave a Kolly Kibber card in the restaurant where he was to have appeared, but the new waitress, Rose, notices that he does not look like the person in the newspaper picture. Pinkie, knowing that he cannot permit this loose end, plans to control her, either with the threat of... (The entire section is 570 words.) Get Free Access link Link At the Brighton pier on a sunny Whitsun bank holiday, a terrified Fred Hale distributes his cards. Under the pseudonym Kolly Kibber, Hale places his cards along the route as part of his job as a newspaper promoter. Pinkie, the new leader of Kite’s gang, begins to haunt Hale for being complicit in Kite’s murder. In a frantic search for comfort and protection, Hale links up with the affable London barmaid Ida Arnold, who is enjoying a relaxing holiday.

Fearing for his life, Hale begs Ida to accompany him for the rest of the day, and she willingly accepts his invitation. Ida makes a quick trip to the ladies room; when she reappears, Hale is gone. He has been kidnapped. He is then murdered by Pinkie’s gang. To establish an alibi after Hale’s murder, Pinkie’s men continue to distribute Hale’s cards along the pier. Gang member Spicer leaves a card at Snow’s restaurant, and a waitress there, Rose, notices that a stranger is distributing Kibber’s cards. Pinkie, in turn, sees Rose’s concern. He then realizes that Rose could be an important witness against the gang in any future trial against them, and so he decides to befriend her. Back in London after her brief holiday, Ida learns of Hale’s death. She sees Hale’s photograph in the newspaper and learns that the authorities have attributed his death to natural causes. Ida, who has “instincts,” smells something “fishy” about the coroner’s report and decides to do some investigating of her own. After interviewing a potential witness and attending Hale’s cremation, Ida is still dissatisfied, and she vows to find justice for Hale.

In the meantime, Pinkie continues to curry favor with Rose. On a date at a local dance hall, Pinkie and Rose discuss religion and find they are both “Romans” (Catholics), albeit with different perspectives; Pinkie’s mind is on Hell and Rose’s is on Heaven. Intent on unmasking the details of Hale’s death, Ida takes a temporary room in Brighton. Following a racetrack tip that Hale had... (The entire section is 838 words.) Get Free Access 'A Sort of' Autobiography -- One of Graham Greene's Best Books 'A Sort of' Autobiography -- One of Graham Greene's Best Books By WALTER CLEMONS A SORT OF LIFE By Graham Greene. he first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet... The dog, as I know now, was a pug owned by my elder sister.

It had been run over- by a horse carriage?- and killed and the nurse thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way." Here, on an early page, as "convenient" and "cadaver" click into the corner pocket, we realize with joy that Graham Greene is writing better than he has in years. His "sort of" autobiography- odd, calm, saturnine and unexpectedly moving- is one of his best books. "A Sort of Life" takes him from what might seem an ideally pastoral boyhood as a schoolmaster's son in the green, Greene-dominated town of Berkhamsted ("The Greenes seemed to move as a tribe like the Bantus, taking possession")- where in his early teens he made several inexpert attempts at suicide; to London at 16 to be psychoanalyzed, "an astonishing thing in 1920," as he notes- an experience from which he emerged "fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath," in numb boredom. Six experiments with Russian roulette followed, already described in a famous essay, "The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard," but retold better here.

He insists as before that this wasn't suicide, whatever a coroner's jury might have ruled: "I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities." No infinite possibilities were realized in his career at Oxford, where he explored staying drunk from morning to night. But there is exhilaration and affection in his accounts of several careers in which he dabbled and didn't get trapped: German espionage ("Didn't it occur to my parents that I was keeping very strange company?" Is it at all likely, the reader wonders after reading his remote description of boyhood relations with them, that he confided in them?); a funny stint as tutor ("I had a horror of becoming involved in teaching"); and a happy period as subeditor on the London Times, which provides some of the warmest memories in the book. It is when he leaves The Times, after acceptance of his first published novel, "The Man Within," that bleakness descends. Success was delusory.

His first novel sold 8,000 copies; his tenth, "The Power and the Glory," more than a decade later, had a first printing of only 3,500. "A Sort of Life" ends even earlier, on the eve of publication of "Stamboul Train" ("Orient Express") in 1932, with Greene's appeal to an old Oxford friend for a job at Chulankarana University near Bangkok. "His favorite reply came just too late to save me from this career of writing. I had been turned back into the pen like a driven sheep by the temporary popular success of 'Stamboul Train.'" He concludes with a reunion many years later with his friend in Bangkok: "For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. And it is incomplete... Knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects; even his unfavorable critics miss them, dwelling on obvious points which can be repaired, but like a skilled intuitive builder he can sniff out the dry rot in the beams.

How seldom he has the courage to dismantle the whole house and start again." There is no suspicion of fake modesty in this. Greene's novels have given him little lasting satisfaction, though he has remained unenthusiastically approving of "The Power and the Glory." In the startling introduction to "The Heart of the Matter," for example, he outdid even George Orwell's scathing review in pronouncing the novel a failure- as well as cuffing the pious who had so industriously debated Scobie's fate after death: "This was not meant to be an issue of the book, for I have small belief in the doctrine of eternal punishment." The most he will allow "The End of the Affair" which I believe to be his masterpiece- the tenderest and psychologically most supple of his novels, and the one in which his kill-joy God is the most passionately faced- is that its first-person narration gave him practice for "The Quiet American," a book he likes better.

He has been particularly gruff with critics who have attributed to him the creation of his own fictional landscape, "Greeneland." Yet Randall Jarrell's remark that Eliot would have written "The Waste Land" about the garden of Eden is just as true of Greene, who has himself written of Walter de la Mare: "Every creative writer worth our consideration... is a victim: a man given over to an obsession." One of the primary interests of this newest book is its mapping of the terrain from which the later fictions grew. The Berkhamsted of Greene's childhood was as far as any place imaginable from the buzzard-guarded, sun-blinded Mexican port of the opening pages of "The Power of the Glory," the tawdry Brighton seafront, the war-wrecked London through which Arthur Lowe stumbles with his memory blasted, the Vietnam rice-paddies, the leper colony. But the garden of his earliest recollections are only slightly less menacing.

He remembers his father's school, "part rosy Tudor, part hideous modern brick the color of a doll's house plaster ham- where the misery of life started, and burial ground, long disused, separated from our flower beds by an invisible line, so that every year the gardener would turn up a few scraps of human bone in remaking the herbaceous border." A charming sketch of his Uncle Graham, "a remarkable man if only we had known it," contains a jolt; he survived into his nineties, care for by two sisters, "and the first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts while undressing him removed a toe with his socks." Uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, parents who loved each other; it is noticeable that the young Graham was solitary among them. "I associated my mother with remoteness, which I did not at all resent, and with a smell of eau de cologne." He put her before us most clearly "in an untroubled coma before death," when "her long white Plantagenet face reminded me of a crusader on a tomb," and as a girl in a family album photograph taken before his birth.

His father is most movingly remembered after his death: "Only when I had children of my own did I realize how his interest in my doings had been genuine and only then I discovered a buried love and sorrow for him which emerges from time to time in dreams." He reconstructs his father's teaching abilities from the testimony of Peter Quennell and Claud Cockburn, who were students in the school. Neither parent is ever heard to speak directly. "I seem to remember," Greene writes, "my father sitting on the bed and interrogating me seriously and tenderly" at the time of his adolescent crisis, but he remembers no words. The simplicity with which he writes of this estrangement, accusing them of nothing, is affecting. It seems to have been an accidental result of his removal to a dormitory in his own father's school, where he was cut off from his family but not accepted by his fellows: "I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster?

I was like the son of a quisling in a country under occupation." The experience was of even slighter objective content than the young Dickens's months in the blacking factory, but of no less subjective power in teaching betrayal and desolation. That the boy's parents were just across the lawn doesn't discredit the experience; it deepens the irony of it. "A Sort of Life" is sure to disappoint and annoy some readers expecting more copious confession. Much will be familiar in substance to faithful readers of Greene. (Even that dead dog in the pram made a brief appearance in "Journey Without Maps," 1936.) The pious will find themselves rebuffed, not for the first time, by his sketchy account of conversion to Catholicism: "I cannot be bothered to remember- I accept. With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth.

One hasn't long to wait for revelation or darkness." The psychiatrically-alert will want to quiz Graham Greene about that lifelong "boredom," unexamined and attributed with a shrug to inherited manic-depression, which has not deterred him from amassing, at the rate of only a couple of pages a day, his formidable output of some 30 books, almost all of them in print. But detractors are invited to notice how carefully this understated memoir is built, and to trace through it the interesting thread of selective obliviousness that is one of its themes.

Greene compares memory at one point to a long broken night: "As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes." He doesn't remember, for instance, of his first love affair with a governess, "the first time I kissed her or the hesitations and timidities which surely must have preceded the kiss," though he remembers the moment when he fell in love with her, "the stretch of beach, my mother reading, the angle from which I examined her body." Suppression and narrowing of focus provide the nervous tension of his best fiction. "A Sort of Life" made me read for the first time his diffuse earliest novels, and they are pretty bad (although "England Made Me" has moments).

All that's changed with the opening sentence of "Brighton Rock": "Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." Though it has some of the crudeness of an innovative work- with only Conrad's "The Secret Agent" as forerunner, and perhaps the distant example of Dostoevsky, we watch Greene inventing his own kind of novel- "Brighton Rock" does not fail in energy, ferocity and dispatch. The ending is devastating because the speed of events has encouraged the reader to forget what's on that pier-booth recording of Pinkie's voice that Rose goes home finally, with the priest's benediction, to play. Greene returns again and again in his autobiography to forgetfulness, describing with satisfaction, for instance, his meeting in Malaya, 30 years after school, a classmate who had tormented him and whom he doesn't recognize: "Perhaps that was my revenge- to have forgotten him so easily." Perhaps forgetfulness is the mark of a minor writer, if you like to rank writers that way. Graham Greene isn't "major" and life-embracing.

He is expert and narrow as John Webster is narrow, bothersome, unnerving and permanently exciting. They leave out a lot. "A Sort of Life" contains an unusual novelist's credo that voices Greene's limitations but is brilliantly worth remembering: "It is better to remain in ignorance of one self and to forget easily... All that we can easily recognize as our experience in a novel is mere reporting: it has a place but an unimportant one. It provides an anecdote, it fills in gaps in a narrative. It may legitimately provide a background, and sometimes we have to fall back on it when imagination falters. Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men- he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination." Though the hero of almost every Graham Greene novel is haunted by the past, one of the oddities of his fiction is how little personal history his characters have outside the bare minimum burden that drives them- the crime, the sin, the act of betrayal they can't forget.

Yet in coming to terms with his own early life, despite the professed limitations of his memory and his reticence on some subjects, Graham Greene writes with a generosity and flexibility that are new in his work. At a point in his long career when it seemed unlikely he could surprise us, he has done it with this moving self-portrait of a man at ease with his past. Walter Clemons, former member of the Book Review staff, joins Newsweek this month as book reviewer. Books Of The Times - NYTimes.com Books Of The Times Published: April 12, 1982 By Mary Cantwell CONTROL. By William Goldman. Dela- corte. 305 pages. $15.95. THERE are writers whose first lines are like lassos. Graham Greene is one of them -''Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours,'' from ''Brighton Rock''; judging by the opening of ''Control,'' William Goldman is another. ''If there was one place in this world Edith never expected trouble,'' he writes, ''it was Bloomingdale's.'' To the reader in the New York area, the sentence is doubtless irresistible.

The ripple effect should stretch to Seattle. Edith Mazursky Holtzman is the rich, redheaded mother of two and an extraordinarily talented painter. Something terrible happens to her at Bloomie's necktie counter. Sally Levinson was Edith's Radcliffe roommate, is now the owner of an art gallery and will be forever her most devoted friend. Charlotte Stewart is a voluptuous beauty married to a stick of a man and lusting for her children's tutor, the poet and virgin Theo Duncan. Billy Boy Winslow is a psychopath as wide as he is high who can kill with just one blow of his sledgehammer fist. Billy Boy is of great interest to a doctor named Leo Trude, who looked like Henry A. Kissinger: ''Ever since Nixon made the fat Jew (the Nixonian terminology) head of State, Trude's life had been intermittently annoying. Yesterday someone had confided to him on Fifth Avenue - a Wall Street type it was - that he had it on unimpeachable authority that Haig was on his way out and he, Henry the K, would soon be reanointed.

When he had dined once at the Palace he had been asked three times where were his Secret Service men.'' Trude has been led to Billy Boy by a blind fortuneteller named Duchess, who lives in a storefront in back of the Port Authority Bus Terminal with a German shepherd. Frank Haggerty is a tough Irish cop whose young partner, the son of a Jewish psychiatrist, is named after Eric Fromm. Eric's twin sister, also a psychiatrist, is named after Karen Horney. These, but for a few minor players like a shoplifter named Sophie and a Puerto Rican superintendent who is going to announcer's school (''I am awed at the power of the media to ed-u-cate, to en-tertain.'') - the kind of showy bits actors give their souls to get - comprise the cast of ''Control.'' What comprises the plot is not to be found here. Why ruin a good story, and why risk tangling one's self in the explication? Reading ''Control'' is a lot like wandering through the labyrinth. One cannot afford to miss a word. Do so and you're traveling the maze without a string around your finger. A few hints, however. Mr.

Goldman seems to have been much impressed by recent newspaper accounts of 20 Laotians whose deaths appear to have been caused by their nightmares. The phenomenon is called Bangungut. He may also have been impressed by Jack Finney's wonderful ''Time and Again.'' On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe it is sheer chance that he, too, is employing the glorious gimmick of ''Time and Again.'' Another hint. Mr. Goldman is always clear about where something is taking place; he is only seemingly clear about when. Time is of the essence here. So is fun. ''Control'' is the kind of novel that one both reads and casts. Chrisopher Reeve for Eric, perhaps, and Burt Lancaster for Haggerty. Jill Clayburgh for Sally Levinson, and for Billy Boy - well, he's got to be an actor who can play both a vicious killer and a chortling 1-year-old. The dialogue, especially during a beer tasting, begs for performers; the sets are terrific. Lincoln Center, for example, and the East River at night, a certain areaway on East 59th Street and a town house on Gramercy Park.

There's a scene, too, that'll have the audience in tears, a funeral attended only by family and a friend or two until - the sound track alone could tear one's heart out. Mr. Goldman's ''Marathon Man'' made an exciting movie. ''Control'' probably will, too. At least one hopes so. Those of us who love thrillers have bottomless appetites for blind seers with Seeing Eye dogs, killers with hands like hams and women to whom something terrible happens at Bloomingdale's. Illustrations: photo of William Goldman What makes a great first line? What makes a great first line? What makes a great first line? An entire story told in a single picture. Image via Wikipedia I recently entered a competition to write the first line of a story. I won’t put in this article what my entry actually is, in order to avoid potentially influencing the judging. To my mind, the very best first line in literature is Graham Greene ‘s Brighton Rock : ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him’.

This tells me everything I need to know to make me want to read further: the name of the main character, the likely direction of the story, the sense of conflicting intention (they want to murder him, implicitly, he doesn’t want to be murdered), the setting, and the relative speed of events. It also nicely contrasts with the title, which might otherwise suggest something rather more prosaic. That’s not to say that a great first line means you are going to enjoy the novel. Nineteen Eighty-four begins with one of the best first lines in literature: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Nonetheless, I hated the book (though it’s a great book) and have no intention of ever reading it again. A Tale of Two Cities is generally regarded as one of Dickens’s weaker stories, but the first line is unforgettable: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,…”.

Likewise, an unprepossessing first line (or one that simply doesn’t represent the book very well) is no sign of an unenjoyable book. “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton” must surely have thrilled every reader desperate to hear more of the doings of the eponymous hero of The Hobbit, but it’s unlikely to have grabbed new readers in quite the earth-shattering way that The Lord of the Rings in its totality eventually did. I asked the question about great first lines on the Amazon Vine reviewer’s forum. As well as commenting on a number of my possible entries, one forum member mentioned that it might do to treat a first line like advertising copy — something which serves no purpose other than to draw the reader in. I’m still mulling this one over.

Certainly a dull first line is not going to get the party started (as they say), but there’s also a certain satisfaction in re-reading a book and savouring an author’s gift for words which goes beyond snatching as much of your attention as possible before getting you to commit to the story. Looking at my notes, which I’ve been gathering over several years, it seems to me that the first line has to do three things: It needs to get you interested enough to read the second line, or, preferably, the whole of the first page. It needs to identify to you what kind of book you are about to read — setting up an expectation that it is a book you are going to want to read. Naturally, you need to satisfy that expectation in the book. It needs to ‘taste’ like the rest of the book. Or possibly smell like it. This is the first whiff of an experience you are never going to forget. Therefore, it must itself be unforgettable, or at the very least savourable until it is unforgotten. Consider the beginning of The Hobbit.

“In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” This might seem an entirely innocuous beginning, but that is because we are used to it. If you were a child hearing that sentence for the first time, then what you are expecting to hear is: “In a hole, in the ground, there lived a rabbit.” Immediately the word ‘hobbit’ is used, the reader or listener is curious: we want to know what a hobbit is. Tolkien does not let us get very far with that before telling us how much hobbits hate adventures, which immediately creates tension, and, before we know it, the most ‘wretched adventure’ has overtaken Bilbo Baggins. In just two or three pages Tolkien has interested us in an entirely imaginary world which we know does not exist, and made us care enough about hobbits to sense the growing horror in the arrival of an adventure — yet we do not even know what the adventure is going to be. It seems to me, reflecting further, that there are a few things which the first line must not do It must on no account answer its own question.

In this sense it is the opposite of the first line of a Press Release, which tells the journalist exactly what the story is going to be about. It mustn’t try too hard: apart from the Dickens example (and this is maybe why the book that followed isn’t one of his best), all of the great first lines listed above are actually quite gentle, quite matter of fact. A grand beginning, such as the start of Beowulf or the Aeniad , is great for epic poetry, but it doesn’t quite suit the intimacy of the novel. Epic poetry is written to be declaimed, novels, except for books for small children, are written to be read by a single reader, or, for children’s books, written to be read by a single reader to just one or two listeners. Here are some of the potential first lines which I decided not to submit to the competition: She wasn’t Cinderella, he wasn’t Prince Charming, the shoe was glass-fibre, and it didn’t fit. This was the first one I came up with, and I rather like it. But it’s more suitable for the blurb on the back cover than it is for the first line. It locks down the story too much.

This is, in some ways, as story told in a single line, or perhaps a clever summary by the panellists on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. If I read that as the first line in a story, I would probably feel I knew how the story was going to end. If it did end that way, I would feel I had wasted my time, and if it didn’t, I would feel disappointed. Here’s another one: The novel had racked up over two hundred and seventy thousand pre-orders, and all Pete now had to do was decide what it was about, and write it. The problem with this one is that it’s eminently forgettable. We’ve seen, read or at least heard about dozens of books or films where a novelist is trying to overcome writer’s block and get the book finished, and we’ve heard many stories, of which the best is The Emperor’s New Clothes, about someone who has accepted payment and does not have a product to provide. It also falls into the eternal trap of writing about writing. Writing about writing can sometimes pay off, but probably every author has tried it at some point, and very few publishers are interested.

In a more science-fiction mood, here is one that attracted a few positive comments: Liverpool was exactly as he remembered it, except for one thing: there were no people. Aside from the fact that this is the scenario for far too many stories and films — The Day of the Triffids , 28 Days Later, I am Legend, you can see I was getting into a rut at this point. The rhythm of these three is all the same: building something up, and then knocking it down with the final sub-clause. Here’s one I liked rather more: The rest of this story only makes sense if you’re prepared to believe that Fontaine really had fallen up the mountain. I like this one because it is immediately challenging the reader to suspend disbelief, which is part of the fun of reading fiction, and it also sets the thought rolling: how does someone fall up a mountain? Who is Fontaine? Why does he have a French name? It immediately makes an offer to the reader: if you’re prepared to suspend disbelief on one point, I will tell you a story which is quite possibly preposterous, but will follow its own logic and make complete sense provided you’re willing to believe that one thing.

By the way, I’ve no idea how the story goes on, but I may get round to writing it. My final thought on first lines is the following: don’t spend too much time on them, don’t agonise about them, and never treat them as some kind of a religion. An English teacher once told our class that he had spent years on his novel, and had rewritten the first page more than a dozen times. I don’t recall ever hearing that it had been published. With the same effort, he could have written, and possibly published, many novels. If you want to be a writer, just get on and write. If you write ten novels in a year and know at the end of the year that all of them are terrible and could never be published, you’ve got a year’s writing behind you and a vast amount of experience, in novel terms. If you spend ten years refining just one novel, without ever completing it, then you are quite possibly polishing something which is just, actually, at the bottom of it, and not to mince words, simply not very good. Write, edit, and then move on. And that goes for the first line as well. Related articles How did Hale die?

A footnote to Brighton Rock. - Free Online Library How did Hale die? A footnote to Brighton Rock. <a href=" Citations: MLA style: "How did Hale die? A footnote to Brighton Rock.." The Free Library. 2002 Marquette University Press 04 Jan. 2017 Chicago style: The Free Library. S.v. How did Hale die? A footnote to Brighton Rock.." Retrieved Jan 04 2017 from APA style: How did Hale die? A footnote to Brighton Rock.. (n.d.) >The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Jan 04 2017 from GRAHAM Greene thought that Brighton Rock may have been the best book he ever wrote, and even his hostile critics like John Carey and Michael Shelden describe it as a "masterpiece." I agree; it seems to me by far Greene's finest novel, though it is not easy to define what kind of novel it is. It has many dimensions: a tough, realistic story of Brighton criminal life, a revenge tragedy, a mass-observing cross-section of the seaside resort in the mid-30s, a Catholic fable about damnation.

Greene originally planned it as a detective novel and that aspect is evident in the arresting opening sentence: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him." Hale is an inky-fingered newspaper man, in Brighton as part of a publicity stunt for his paper; under the name of Mr. Kolley Kibber he goes through the town on a previously published itinerary distributing cards in hidden places. Anyone who finds one can claim ten shillings from the paper, but the big prize is reserved for anyone who recognizes and challenges Kolley Kibber with the right form of words. Hale is right; only twenty pages into the novel he is dead, and we know who has killed him: the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie Brown and his little group of associates, Cubitt, Dallow and Spicer. They have been following Hale round Brighton and as protection he picks up Ida Arnold, a cheerful, pleasure-loving divorcee (a Mae West lookalike, as Greene admitted) who has come down to Brighton for the Bank Holiday. She enjoys his company but has to leave him for a few minutes to go to the Ladies' near the Palace Pier; when she emerges, Hale has disappeared.

Later his body is found in a shelter on the Front some way off towards Hove. According to the newspaper report of the inquest, which Ida reads in London, Hale died of natural causes, but remembering how scared he was she is skeptical and resolves to find out more. The gangsters themselves are baffled by the verdict; Spicer says, "That verdict sort of shook us all. What did they mean by it? We did kill him Pinkie?" Pinkie, otherwise the Boy, seems happy to accept the verdict but Spicer goes on worrying: "When the races began again he wouldn't feel so bad, he wouldn't think so much about Hale. It was the medical evidence which upset him: `death from natural causes,' when with his own eyes he'd seen the Boy ... It was fishy, it wasn't straight." Pinkie decides that Spicer is "milky" and untrustworthy, and with the ruthlessness and ingenuity of a villain in a Jacobean tragedy he disposes of him by pushing him through some broken bannisters so that he falls to his death. It is not until well into the novel that we know Pinkie's motive for killing Hale: "Maybe he wasn't worth killing.

A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed." Colleoni is Pinkie's powerful rival in running race-track gangs in Brighton, and Kite was the former gang-leader whom Colleoni's men had slashed to death on St. Pancras Station. Pinkie took over the gang; he imitates Kite's style, and venerates his memory for having rescued him from destitution in the Brighton slums and setting him up in a respectable criminal career. Meanwhile Ida is playing the detective; she returns to Brighton and persuades an inspector at the police station to let her see the post-mortem report on Hale, which states clearly enough that he died of a coronary thrombosis. But it also refers to superficial bruises on the upper arms and this arouses her suspicions; the inspector dismisses them, saying the bruises could have been caused by jostling among the Bank Holiday crowds. As far as he is concerned the case is closed but Ida is determined to find out more.

The classical question in detective novels is "whodunit?" But Brighton Rock is dominated by a different question, "was it done at all?" Or, how can the medical evidence show that Hale died of a heart attack when the gangsters are sure, and Ida suspects, that he has been murdered? One of her grounds for suspicion is that Hale's body has been found near the West Pier where they originally met, and she cannot understand why Hale should have retraced his steps for the best part of a mile. We may not know how Hale died, but we know precisely when he died. As a clock strikes half-past one Ida comes out of the Ladies' and finds that he has vanished. At 1:45 Pinkie is in a shooting booth on the Palace Pier and is at pains to confirm the time with the stall-holder, who insists that the clock is right: "It doesn't stand for any phoney alibis." Just before ten to two Pinkie is in a tea-room on the pier and by 1:55 he is joined by the rest of the gang, whom he rebukes for being late. "`Don't take on so,' Cubitt said.

`All you'd got to do was come straight across.'" Hale must have died between 1:30 and 1:45. Dallow and Cubitt have taken the body in their battered old Morris to deposit it in a shelter at about the place where "Kolley Kibber" should have been according to his itinerary; if anyone had spotted them they could have said that Hale was ill or drunk. Pinkie is at pains to establish an alibi; with the same end, Spicer has been distributing Hale's cards along his route. He makes what is to prove the fatal error of leaving one in Snow's restaurant, where he is seen by the young waitress Rose. Where Hale dies takes longer to discover, though we know it is close to the Palace Pier. Much later in the story, when Pinkie, still fearing discovery, has married Rose so that she cannot give evidence against him in court, the newlyweds go to a small shop selling Brighton rock, situated under the Parade. The place obviously has a special significance for Pinkie: "Miss," he said. "Miss.

Two sticks of rock." He looked round the lime pink barred cell as if he owned it, it was stamped with footmarks, a particular patch of floor had eternal importance: if the cash register had been moved he'd have noticed it. "What's that?" he said and nodded at a box, the only unfamiliar object there. "It's broken rock" she said, "going cheap" "From the maker's?" "No. It got broken. Some clumsy fools--" she complained. "I wish I knew who ..." The shop is evidently what Spicer, restlessly wandering round Brighton, has earlier thought of as "The Place where It had been done." Pinkie leaves the shop with "a momentary sense of his own cleverness." We can conclude that Hale, during Ida's brief absence, has been seized by the gang, bundled into their car and driven the short distance to the rock shop, which they must have known would be unattended, perhaps arranged for it to be. There is a struggle, during which some sticks of rock were broken. Hale dies; but how? There is a prominent clue a little earlier.

Ida, now firmly on the case, is interrogating Cubitt, who suddenly bursts out with, "I can't see a piece of Brighton Rock without ..." She cannot get any more out of him and the phrase does not mean anything to her, but it has been picked up by Greene's critics, who believe it offers the explanation of Hale's death. Michael Shelden, in his hostile biography of 1994, Graham Greene: The Man Within, is very specific: In the end, Pinkie and his gang have no difficulty in trapping Hale and taking his life with the perfect weapon. By shoving a long stick of "Brighton Rock" down his throat, they are able to kill him and dispose of the weapon at the same time. The hard stick of sugar slowly dissolves in the body, and after the police find Hale, they assume that he died a natural death. David Lodge, in a review of Shelden's book, remarked on him being the first to come up with this ingenious explanation. But others had got to it before, such as Norman Sherry in the first volume of his biography, and David G.

Wright, writing in The Explicator in 1983, who confidently refers to "the grotesque oral rape of Hale with a stick of rock." The idea seems to have become established; clues in Greene's text point to it, and such a means of murdering Hale would have appealed to Pinkie's ingenious cruelty. But there are major difficulties. Shelden's idea that the stick of rock, once rammed down Hale's throat, would have dissolved and left no trace, could only come from an American writer who has no experience of English seaside rock: its hardness, and the long time it takes to be sucked away. A death caused in this way would certainly have caused lacerations to the mouth and throat that the post-mortem would have revealed. There is no suggestion in the book that the post-mortem is incorrect, even though, as Ida believes, there is more to Hale's death than the heart attack it identifies. She arrives at her own explanation of what happened: "They took Fred down under the parade, into one of those little shops and strangled him--least they would have strangled him, but his heart gave out first ...

They strangled a dead man..." Ida makes a good guess about the sequence of events, though strangulation would also have left marks on Hale's neck that the post-mortem would have detected. But, as she concludes, however Hale was "killed" he was already dead. It is a puzzle that runs through the book, baffling to the gangsters and to Ida, to the novel's several generations of readers, and to recent academic critics who are determined to crack it. One might attempt a solution by saying that Pinkie started to kill Hale by ramming the rock into his mouth, but that before he got it in very far--that is, not far enough to cause lacerations--Hale, already in a state of mortal fear, collapsed and died from a heart attack. This is a tidy but lame explanation, which just about covers the appearances, but I am not convinced by it. It may well be that Greene, who, as his biographers have described, was much given to practical jokes, deliberately scattered clues in the form of cryptic references and unfinished sentences about what happened to Hale, but that he had no intention of letting the mystery be finally and neatly resolved.

Such satisfying resolutions are what we expect to find in the traditional detective novel, but Brighton Rock, even though it may have started off as one, turned into a more complex and less reassuring mode of writing. Works Cited Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock. 1938. Reprint. New York: Bantam, 1968 Shelden, Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House, 1994. Wright, David G. "Greene's Brighton Rock." The Explicator. 41.4 (Summer). 1983. 52. Bernard Bergonzi has published a dozen books of literary criticism and similar writing, mostly on modern British literature, plus some collections of poetry and a novel. He has just completed a biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic brother, Thomas Arnold Junior, which is to be published by Oxford University Press. COPYRIGHT 2002 Marquette University Press No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder. Copyright 2002 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Article Details Brighton Rock by Graham Greene – review | Books | The Guardian Brighton Rock by Graham Greene – review Graham Greene's malevolent young antihero in this 1938 bestseller still resonates with modern audiences Sam Riley as Pinkie Brown in the new film version of Brighton Rock, set in the 1960s. Photograph: c.Everett Collection / Rex Features Sophia Martelli Share on Messenger Close It is the tension between the two faces of Brighton – the illuminated tourist bling and the gritty, mobster-laced industry behind the façade – that sets up the intrigue in Greene's classic 1938 novel of good and evil; and it's the menacing, sinisterly youthful antihero Pinkie who continues to fascinate today. This reissue, with an introduction by JM Coetzee, coincides with the book's adaptation (again) to screen by Rowan Joffe, setting it in 1964 with Sam Riley in the lead role; Joffe's foreword to this edition is almost an apologia for daring to remake John Boulting's 1947 version, famous for Richard Attenborough's ferocious performance as Pinkie.

As well as bringing Greene commercial success, Brighton Rock also heralded the author's emergence as a "Catholic novelist". From the opening line – "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him" – the narrative has the pull of a thriller. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie is trying to cover up his involvement in Hale's murder. To do this he must silence Rose – waitress, fellow "Roman", key witness, and as innocent and youthful as her name suggests – either by marriage or by death. To Pinkie, allergic as he is to intimacy, these are interchangeable fates. The person that stands in his way is Ida Arnold, Fred Hale's companion on his last day on earth. Ebullient and full of laughter, middle-aged Ida is determined to find the truth behind Hale's death; and once she finds it, to save Rose from her terrible destiny.

Ida is a curious but effective avenging angel: non-religious but superstitious (she believed "only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped") and her outlook contrasts vividly with that of Pinkie and Rose, who are enmeshed by images of heaven and hell; of redemption offered but never taken up. Why does this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate? Its energy and power is that of the rebellious adolescent, foreshadowing the rise of the cult of youth in the latter part of the 20th century. And while Catholicism may have given way to secularism, Pinkie ultimately realises that hell isn't located in some distant realm: it's right here, present on earth, all around us.

Question: """Hale knew before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him..."" are the opening words to which Graham Greene novel?"
Answer: Brighton Rock