Brighton Rock

GRAHAM GREENE divided his fiction into two categories, namely serious literary novels and what he described as ‘entertainments’.

- Graham Greene & Jack Watkins

The latter were so named, he maintained, because they did not carry a message. In fact, the line between the two sometimes blurred. It’s easy enough to see why The Man Within, Stamboul Train and Our Man In Havana were classed as entertainments, in comparison with the weightier The Power and the Glory and A Burnt-Out Case.

However, the entertainment Brighton Rock, which Greene explained in the second volume of his autobiography Ways of Escape (1980), ‘began as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgement’, was the first of his works to introduce the Catholic themes. Critics began to classify him as a Catholic writer, a term the author despised, preferring to emphasize that he was a writer who also happened to be a Catholic.

Greene had converted to Catholicism in 1926, but was to wrestle with theological arguments, the darkness of the supernatural and more commonplace human values for long after-wards. In Brighton Rock, published in 1938, he used the chief characters to explore the differences between a secular world’s understanding of right and wrong religious notions of good and evil and of the existence of Heaven and Hell. The blowsy, ageing good-time-girl Ida Arnold stands for conventional justice, with her curiosity about the world beyond stretching no further than consulting a Ouija board. Pitted against her is the young mobster Pinkie, tortured by his Catholic upbring- ing, mortal sin and ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’. He, knowingly committing evil acts, is in turn contrasted with his girl and fellow Catholic, the virtuous Rose.