Extricating a grain of pleasure...

Works such as Brighton Rock restore hope rather than destroy it. You always find something that startles you with its beauty.

It may be named after a candy sold at a seaside resort, but Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is anything but saccharine in nature. A story about violence and the nature of sin set in a sunny holiday spot, Greene’s book increasingly veers to the dark side and the reader might feel the end provides a release to everyone within the story as well as those reading it.

Reading Brighton Rock and reflecting on the life of its acclaimed author (one of the most important British writers of the 20th century), it’s strange to think that someone from a genteel background could write a book heaving with such menace and seediness and intricacies of gang wars.

But then Greene was always drawn to the dark underbelly of modern life — whether at home in England or in any country that was a playground for world powers battling each other in proxy wars that devastated the indigenous populations. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie, the razor-wielding teenage gang leader, is out for blood from the start.

The book itself begins from the point of view of the man Pinkie will murder — a journalist named Charles Hale who’d previously betrayed Pinkie’s gang. This is not a spoiler by the way — the first line of the book gives away Hale’s fate: “Hale knew before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

What Pinkie doesn’t realise is that Ida Arnold, a kind-hearted woman who’d briefly met Hale, is pursuing him with a mission to solve the murder and ensure the killer is brought to justice. While Pinkie might be seen as the embodiment of evil, Ida is clearly the goodness that redresses the balance in a world that can be unspeakably cruel. I first watched the 1947 adaptation of Brighton Rock starring a young Richard Attenborough as Pinkie before reading the book in one sitting. It is inevitable to ask why we should put ourselves through the wringer with stories like this. Surely the real world as it is now is bleak enough; we don’t need to encounter an absolute downer in our entertainment as well. But it seems to me that reading works such as Brighton Rock restores hope rather than destroys it. You find, even in the less pleasant corners, something to startle you with its beauty:

“With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors’ caps.”

Reading Brighton Rock allows you to step into another world — to be sure it’s a world where the Brighton sunshine doesn’t bless everyone equally with pleasure and relief. But as you roam the promenade and the back streets and pubs and rundown lodgings of post-war Britain, you see the world as Greene saw it: good and evil locking horns in a constant, eternal dance but good does notch up victories where most needed. And there’s something life-affirming and hopeful in that.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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