Brighton Rock
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Published in 1938, Brighton Rock is Graham Greene’s chilling portrait of violence, conscience and damnation in the tawdry seaside world of pre-war Brighton. When seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie Brown murders a journalist, he attempts to protect himself by manipulating Rose, a young waitress who becomes entangled in his crimes, while Ida Arnold, an outspoken and pleasure-loving woman, pursues the truth. Beneath its tightly wound plot of gang warfare, blackmail and murder, Greene’s novel becomes a disturbing study of the conflict between earthly morality and religious belief.
One of Greene’s most celebrated early novels, Brighton Rock combines the momentum of a crime thriller with the gravity of a Catholic moral fable. Its vividly rendered streets, racecourses and seafront amusements form the setting for a darker inquiry into sin, free will, innocence and the possibility of redemption. In Pinkie, Greene creates a frighteningly young and complicated antagonist whose fear of damnation sits uneasily beside his capacity for cruelty, while Ida’s instinctive belief in justice challenges the assumption that religious conviction guarantees goodness.
From the book
“You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
On Brighton Rock
“A serious novel could be an exciting novel — that the novel of adventure could also be the novel of ideas.”
— Ian McEwan, on Brighton Rock