Graham Greene – Brighton Rock

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Book Review, Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

A disturbing read – and perhaps more so than the author intended.

Graham Greene is a favourite author of mine and one re-read from time to time. Recently, I’ve been re-reading some of his earlier, pre-Second World War books, those described by him as ‘Entertainments’ – this one, A Gun For Hire, The Ministry Of Fear.

Something which currently is sitting uncomfortably with me, most shocking from a writer who developed into someone who seemed to have a tender, humane understanding of our complex, fragile, muddied up, neither angel nor demon/beast, but mashed up both, is the casual anti-Semitism expressed, many times, within this book (and, on a recent re-read, there it is again in A Gun For Hire)

Both books are about various layers of villainy and corruption. Brighton Rock (the title has a double meaning, as becomes clear towards the end of the novel) was of course made particularly famous by the film starring a baby-faced Dickie ‘Darling’ Attenborough, as the teenaged, vicious, damaged ‘Pinkie’. The plot concerns two rival criminal mobs, working the gambling industry and more. The seedy, less successful end is a small-time gang, currently led by a damaged seventeen year old, a slum-child, raised a Catholic, from a violent background. This is Pinkie. The successful gang, able to manipulate those in authority, is led by rich and powerful Jew, Colleoni. Later in the book it is intimated he may go into politics as a Conservative. Once again there is the suggestion which surfaces of some sort of Jewish conspiracy. However unpleasant, however vicious, however thuggish Pinkie is, the violence of his background is placed before us, ‘what chance did he have’ We don’t get offered ‘mitigating circumstances’ for Colleoni.

What this did for me, yet again, was to expose how pervasive a generalised anti-Semitism was in society. I guess it took a couple more years (this was published in 1938) before people would begin to distance themselves from this particular manifestation of racial stereotyping.

Outwith the discomfort for the reader who comes to this after the events of the Second World War, this is still a disturbing and complex read, though one with a strong narrative drive and a believable triumvirate of central characters, like an unholy version of Father Son and Holy Spirit, (as Catholicism and the Trinity runs deeply through it) Instead, we have a version of Mother, Daughter and Unholy Spirit.

Richard Attenborough as Pinkie

Graham Greene when young

Pinkie, in fact at one point, who sees himself as damned, corrupt (and is so) says ‘Credo in unum Satanum’. Ida, the blowsy, materialism-being-here-is-all-there-is who is the instigator of nearly all which transpires, through her desire for justice and to see right done, has no religion, but a lust for the physicality of life. She drinks hard, she beds hard, and has no sense of ‘mortal sin’ Ida, who has no children, nevertheless takes a Motherly protective role to the other damaged youngster, Rose, a young waitress from a similar background to Pinkie, also a Catholic, but one still believing. Rose will be sacrificed between Ida and Pinkie, as their different agendas play out – but Rose is also the willing sacrifice, choosing to damn herself, knowingly.

It’s an unsettling book, dark, and hopeless in many ways – and yet full of passages of beauty and energy. For reasons which I can’t quite explain, it reminded me of Kandinsky’s paintings – these nuggets of light and colour and vibrant energy and precision of place, form, time, and rich meaning, all within a narrative drive which got darker and darker

                                  Fugue, Kandinsky, 1914, Wiki Commons

A stranger; the word meant nothing to her: there was no place in the world where she felt a stranger. She circulated the dregs of the cheap port in her glass and remarked to no-one in particular: ‘It’s a good life.’ There was nothing with which she didn’t claim kinship: the advertising mirror behind the barman’s back flashed her own image at her; the beach girls went giggling across the parade; the gong beat on the steamer for Boulogne – it was a good life. Only the darkness in which the Boy walked, going from Billy’s, going back to Billy’s, was alien to her: she had no pity for something she didn’t understand. She said; ‘I’ll be getting on.’

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Graham Greene – A Gun For Sale

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A Gun For Sale, Book Review, Graham Greene

Territory of the Thirties Suspense Novel

Graham Greene’s early novels include several which he grouped as ‘Entertainments’ – written between the wars and during the war, they often involve espionage, shadowy groups of subversives intent on destroying the normal fabric of life – and who those ‘subversives’ are, and what their intent is, shifts as the forces are arraigned against each other in the Second World War.

I have just re-read the 1934 A Gun For Sale – where, curiously, it is the Balkan flashpoint of the First World War that is seen as the possible touchpaper for a Second. And the driver, or creator of the possible war is firmly seen as capitalist armaments manufacturers. War that uses assassination (in this case, of a pacifist socialist) to try to provoke the conflagration of war, in order to increase profits

The complex strands of human foibles, strengths and sufferings are clearly in evidence in this short suspense novel. The ‘Gun For Sale’, the hired assassin, is Raven, a man with a hare-lip. Raven came from a violent, abusing home, denied affection and regard; witnessing whilst young a horrific event, he is brought up in institutions. Greene is straight into the complexity of making the reader engage with the question of where the responsibility for Raven and his kind, really lies.

The central relationship in the story is that between Raven, who never trusted ‘a skirt’, and Ann, the girlfriend of Mathers, the solid, dependable, trustworthy policeman who is hunting Raven down for a crime he did not commit.

Ann is a dancer in a third-rate musical company, and is herself someone of slightly dubious sexual morality. Showgirls dispense mild favours in order to get dinners. By chance, Ann and Raven tangle when he uses her as a shield to evade arrest. She is drawn into the plot through pity for Raven, and a sense that injustice has been done to him. She abhors what she realises he has done, but the sense of wrong done TO him is still strong.

Greene finds plenty of opportunities to show what is an enduring theme in his book – how the corrupt and vicious, particularly those on the margins of society, are not without nobility, and that the upstanding and virtuous may have shadowy, less attractive sides.

This is a pacey read, right from the arresting murder at the start, and all characters are complex and three dimensional.

However, I was left with a sense of unease, in that there are a couple of throwaway allusions which read as anti-Semitic towards the real villain of the piece, the powerful steel magnate who wishes to push Europe towards war for the sake of profits.

Of course, we have all become very much more alert to the ways in which racist thinking exists and existed. Greene almost casually mentions that this character might have come from Jewry. He is a shadowy figure and links to International Capitalism. A scant few years after the publication of this book, the spectre of a demonised, Jewish conspiracy was being used to whip up a nation to either commit, or turn a blind eye to, horrific acts. The almost casual way in which, in 2 or 3 sentences Greene expresses anti Semitism, was a bit of a shocking slap in the face. Clearly, a degree of anti-Semitism did exist in this country almost without it being thought about, but the shock for me was to find its expression in the writing of this most humane and compassionate writer about human frailties.

Run Down Industrial Midlands polished up into LA Glamour

At various points the title of the book changed to A Gun for Hire, This Gun For Sale or This Gun For Hire – A film version transposed seedy ‘Nottwich’, a drab Midlands town, to LA, with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd as Ann and Raven, and Robert Preston as Mather. Raven’s hare-lip was Hollywooded into a damaged wrist (!)

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Graham Greene – The Ministry Of Fear

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Book Review, Espionage, Graham Greene, Second World War, The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear is Within as well as Without…….”.If one loved one feared “

Even a Greene novel written before he flowered into his middle and later period of novels about more metaphysical and existential concerns, and described by him as one of his ‘For Entertainment’ novels, is a master-class in how to combine a page turning thriller with stunning psychological nuance, interesting character, believable and immediate time and location setting, and the darker waters of ‘what it means to be human’. (which is always what I am most aware of with Greene)

The Ministry Of Fear, published in 1943, could be regarded on one level as a propaganda novel – beware, look out for ‘The Enemy Within’ and, like the equally page-turning, jolly-good-read A Gun For Hire, is a dazzling example of how to do pot-boiling with something much more substantial, and much less just formulaic, a-bubble in that pot.

This was a very pleasurable re-read for me; Greene is a writer I do return to, and can always find new, and more, to engage with, whilst sinking into the comfort of knowing the narrative journey, subsequent reads give more time to enjoy the view.

In brief, Arthur Rowe, a man with a fatal flaw – pity, an inability to bear either his own, or another’s suffering – and how this is a flaw for him (and others) will be revealed – visits, by chance a fete in war-torn London. Immediately we are in Greene-land – the complicated, thoughtful, damaged and introspective hero, walks back into the golden memory of childhood safety, the sweet remembered goodness of a golden age – and discovers this is only patina, there is no safe space. Chance, the perfidy of fate, has brought him an encounter which was never meant to be his. He wins a cake in the raffle which is somehow linked with espionage for Germany. And the whole plot proceeds, from here, tying Rowe further and further like a fly caught in a malevolent spider’s web of ‘only connect’ as the sticky threads of connection proceed for ill, rather than for benevolence.

Ministry of Information Second World War Official Collection on Wiki Commons – Fete in Russell Square, 1943

Typical Greene that plunges the reader into perfidy and betrayal, not through espionage in high places, with sophisticated protagonists, but through the most prosaic surface of little, local England, peopled with kind bobbies and paternalistic vicars.

He rips the surface away, and builds, right from the start, the creeping growth of fear, and nothing to be trusted. As a kind of comment on the world he leads us into, are small excerpts as chapter heading, quotes picked from a book by the Victorian writer Charlotte M. Yonge, called The Little Duke, which Rowe picks up second hand at the fete, as part of that romantic golden glow misremembered simple world of childhood. Yonge wrote ‘homilies’ for the young, about high ideals, simply expressed. Greene’s characters yearn to achieve those ideals, but are spotted and stained by the complexity of living in the real world, where morality is not always so clear

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man – a man who either takes tea or coffee for breakfast, a man who likes a good book and perhaps reads biography rather than fiction, a man who at a regular hour goes to bed, who tries to develop good physical habits but possibly suffers from constipation, who prefers either dogs or cats, and has certain views about politics.

It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous

This is what Greene does so superbly – makes the extraordinary ordinary, and the ordinary extraordinary.

Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery………..Knowledge was the great thing…..not abstract knowledge, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed passionate trivial human knowledge…….One can’t love humanity. One can only love people

This book positively sings with all manner of……’now I really need to reflect on this’….all delectably wrapped up in a page-turning espionage plot which positively suggests a Hitchcock noir film.

In reality, The Ministry Of Fear was turned into a film by Fritz Lang. I have not seen the film but the fact that by all accounts it had a jollier, Hollywood wrap ending completely misses the point of Greene’s book, where even the obvious wrap which we might see coming from fairly early on, is nuanced by the sour sadness of accommodation and compromise. High ideals are rarely achieved with full untarnished glitter, there is always, ‘in real’ a spot of wear and tear, a small stain which is pervasive.

A marvellous book, highly entertaining, absolutely disciplined, and solidly ‘about stuff’

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Graham Greene – The End of The Affair

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Book Review, End of The Affair, Graham Greene

The affair between man, woman and the divine

This is my absolute favourite of Graham Greene‘s books, and one I reread every 5 years or so.

Obviously I know absolutely ‘what happens’ but am always moved by the intensity of the journey, the depth of characterisation and the struggles engaged in by the central characters

The familiar Greene territory is all here – betrayal, guilt, responsibility, sin and redemption, and the uneasy, unwilling nature of faith, belief and spiritual identity

Unlike the works which are set in foreign or exotic locations, this book is set in a more pedestrian territory, blitz torn London, and whilst ‘the affair’ of the book is ostensibly one that happens between a man and a woman, the underneath or overriding affair or relationship is that between a man/woman and his or her understanding of God.

This is a very common theme for Greene, and of course mirrors his own relationship with his faith – never easy, never taken for granted, always a sense of the soul wrangling with an accommodation with Divinity.

This is a wonderful and often bleak book, and, with a female as well as a male central character, and the relationship between the sexes as pivotal, it may speak to anyone who has ever fallen in love and found themselves caught in a minefield of conflicting loyalties, secrecy and deception

Something else I admire in this book, with a tendency, it seems, for many current writers to say more than they need to, is Greene’s economy with words. This is a slim volume, clear, but rich and layered. Greene knew how to cut away the unneeded flab, and give each word its due weight. A masterly exercise in precision, and the avoidance of self-indulgence. A quick. clear read, but it burrows in deep.

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