Ian McEwan, for example, is keen to secularise Greene’s fiction into the realm of mere psychological thrillerdom his first encounter with Brighton Rock convinced him that “the novel of adventure could also be the novel of ideas.” McEwan is perfectly correct that Greene’s novel straddles two camps but, keen to laicise what he sees as theological melodrama, McEwan is left with a thriller of no real consequence: if “sin and damnation” are not at issue, then the novel loses its appalling strangeness – it becomes convoluted psycho-babble. seriously fail to understand the novel, even when they are Greene enthusiasts.

I have argued elsewhere that Coetzee et al.

In the corpus of criticism on Greene’s work, Coetzee’s view has been in the ascendant: Harold Bloom dismisses the novel’s “theological tendentiousness,” Frank Kermode concludes that Greene is of the Devil’s party “and comes near to knowing it” with few exceptions (Waugh a notable dissenter), criticism on the novel has subscribed to George Orwell’s famous denunciation: “He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned.” Pinkie marries Rose in order to silence her, while Ida “works on” the girl in an attempt to persuade her to talk. A second arena of action involves Pinkie’s relationship with the naïve Rose, also Catholic: a potential witness in the criminal investigation. Ida Arnold, a free-spirited goodtime girl in whose company Hale passes his final hours, resolves to bring Pinkie to justice. Pinkie may do his best to elevate his acts to the sphere of sin and damnation, but to the doughty Ida Arnold they are simply crimes that deserve punishment of the law, and in this world, which is the only world we have, it is Ida’s view that prevails.Ī bald plot outline make Coetzee’s case plausible: on a bank holiday weekend in Brighton, Hale, pressman for the Evening Star, is murdered by Pinkie, the young hoodlum and tormented Catholic vying for control of Brighton’s racecourse gangs. In his Foreword, Coetzee confidently casts Pinkie as the villain of the piece, and Ida Arnold as its heroine: JM Coetzee introduced Brighton Rock, Greene’s 1938 novel about racecourse gangs set in seedy prewar Brighton. In 2004, Vintage issued special editions of Graham Greene’s novels to commemorate the centenary of his birth, complete with forewords by luminaries of the literary world.

Brighton rock 1938