Pinkie’s worst crime is the murder of a man. He is described as ‘malign and ruthless’, and by Coetzee as ‘amoral, charmless, prim, seething with resentment… a chilling specimen of the Adolf Hitler type’. Pinkie, aged seventeen, is the novel’s protagonist, and is described by Coetzee as ‘a product of the dreariest Brighton shores’. The novel, points out Coetzee, was ‘initially planned as a crime novel easily adapted for the screen’. Coetzee describes the ‘tracts of shabbily built houses, dreary shopping areas, and desolate industrial suburbs’, and then goes on to write of Greene’s exploration of the place. He writes of the ‘nest of criminal activity’ which has Brighton’s racetrack at its core, and speaks of the way in which Greene dives into the darker side of the town. The Vintage edition which I read features an introduction by J.M. After forgetting some of the details in the following years, I deemed that it was high time to pick up the highly-regarded novel, which focuses upon gang which is ‘raging through the dark heart of Brighton’ in the 1930s. I watched the film adaptation some years ago, which I enjoyed, but found rather disturbing. But there’d be better ones, too-like staying in to watch the Attenborough original (now available streaming on Amazon) or, better yet, locking the door and going to bed with Greene’s searing, unforgettable book.I have read a couple of prolific author Graham Greene’s novels to date, but have always been most intrigued by his most famous work, Brighton Rock (1938).

There would be worse things to do with your summer evening than to go see this moody little crime melodrama. The story needs a flamboyant force for good to counterbalance the centripetal pull of Pinkie’s ruthless evil.Īll in all, this new Brighton Rock strikes me as a minor but effective exercise in neo-noir style. (In the novel, and as portrayed by Hermione Baddeley, she’s forever leading barroom sing-alongs and getting maudlin over mugs of stout.) Mirren delivers a powerful performance as the steel-willed, soft-hearted Ida (and gets to throw a little sexual heat at the unlikely target of John Hurt), but her character’s motivation for going to such lengths to save her new employee remains abstract. It may have been the director’s decision as much as Mirren’s to tone down Ida’s larger-than-life mannerisms.

It pains me to say anything even remotely negative about Helen Mirren, but a part of me wishes she’d dug down deeper into her character’s cheerfully brazen sluttiness.

Brighton rock book review