These as notes on critical essays that cover Graham Greene's 'Brighton Rock'. They will help to increase your understanding of the text and hopefully boost your grade!
Brighton Rock Chapter Summaries and Key Quotations
Brighton Rock: Key Quotes
Brighton Rock: Study Guide
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Elements of Crime Writing
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Brighton Rock – Critical Essays
Introduction
• Brighton was a nest of criminal activity, centring on its racetrack
• Amoral, charmless, prim, seething with resentment against ‘them’ and against the ‘bogies’ whom ‘they’ use to
keep him down
• He is a chilling specimen of the Adolf Hitler type
• Rose is a plain, timid girl ready to worship any boy who takes notice of her
• ‘Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, Mercy, I asked, mercy I found’
• Pinkie possesses a Luciferin pride
• Later in life Green said that he did not uphold the doctrine of eternal damnation. The world contained enough
suffering to qualify as a purgatory in itself
• Greene often quoted Robert Browning – ‘our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things, the honest thief, the
tender murderer, the superstitious atheist’
• Greene felt that without a religious awareness, or at least without an awareness of the possibility of sin, the
novelist could not do justice to the human condition
Overview
• It is not a murder mystery
• Murder or acts of violence are an everyday part of the dark underworld which is seething with bitterness and
terror. Intimidation and murder are common
• The language used is raw and Green uses the slang of the underworld to give a sense of realism
• The novel has much in common with morality plays of the medieval period as it ensures that right triumphs over
wrong
A Clash of Ideologies – Pinkie and Ida in Brighton Rock
• It subverts the traditional ‘whodunnit’ form by revealing the identity of the criminals early on, and switches
instead to study the nature of the criminal and his nemesis
• The murder of Hale is of less importance than the clash between Pinkie and Ida
• Pinkie is a product of the pre-war Brighton slums
• He is aware of the fundamental tenets of Catholicism and he possess a world view informed by his religious
upbringing
• Ida represents Pinkie’s polar opposite: social rather than isolated, trusting rather than suspicious, nurturing rather
than vicious and violent, female and older
• Ida is lower-middle class, world-wise but not highly educated maker her at odds with the polite refined manners
of Golden Age amateur detectives
• She comes to conclusions more by trial and error and luck than through logic, reasoning and forensic methods
• She has a better grasp of the essential Christian morality (doing right by others) than Pinkie
• Pinkie’s emphasis on belief in the evil rather than God is key to his rejection of love
• He doesn’t believe in providence or redemption but merely in fate and that he is doomed regardless of his
actions so it makes no difference how he behaves and he has no fear of justice or death
• He becomes increasingly isolated by his own paranoia and violence as he erodes his power base by
eliminating and driving away his own men, leaving himself vulnerable
• Rose is the bargaining chip that he feels obliged to play in order to secure his own freedom, but, ironically, he
views the marriage as a trap
• Greene brings pathos to his character that comes across despite his wickedness
• Contrary to the tidiness of the classic detective novel ending, he leaves Rose potentially with child and with a
message of hatred that will provide her with ‘the worst horror of all’ – she is still a victim and not protected by
Ida’s victory as Pinkie’s destructive influence lingers after his death
• It explores the wider philosophical implications of violence and hatred
• Ida’s simplistic wrapping-up of the crime narrative to her friend, unaware of the legacy that Pinkie has left
behind him. Pinkie fills the novel and the world of Brighton with a pervasive sense of evil that remains ever after
he vanishes into the sea
• Though the criminal is pursuing, and finally eliminated form the story, the problem of evil remains
The Life of Graham Greene
• “I don’t think that Pinkie was guilty of mortal sin because his actions were not committed in defiance of God,
but arose out of the conditions to which he had been born’ – GG 1979
• He tried to write the world as it was
• There is never a sense that Pinkie is Pinkie because of his social background. Pinkie is defiant and seeks with a
religious passion his own damnation
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