Readers Place

About the Book

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J.M. COETZEE A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Graham Greene s gripping thriller was adapted into a British film noir in 1947 starring Richard Attenborough as the razor-wielding Pinkie.

Starting Points for Discussion

• Does Pinkie have a morbid and deluded imagination, or is he right in his view of the world?

• Do you believe that Pinkie would be satisfied/happy and consider himself successful if he had managed to: silence Rose, move out of the room he rents at Frank’s, gain control of the race track and somehow manage to run Colleoni out of Brighton?

• Do you feel that it is unrealistic how easily Ida seems to come across evidence and clues that will lead her to her goal of justice (even gaining help from the ‘spirit world’ via the Ouija Board) while Pinkie seems to be thwarted at every turn (relying on greater risks to secure his innocence in the Hale murder)?

• Pinkie constantly reminds Rose that he isn’t afraid of anything, he fears nothing, yet his actions betray his words; he is willing to do almost anything to avoid going to jail. Does Pinkie fear damnation in the afterlife? Or is he more afraid of physical pain, embarrassment and jail?

• When and how does Pinkie change from being the hunter “before the kill” to being the hunted?

• Do you feel that Rose does what Pinkie wants out of Love or out of her Duty as a wife? Is she not too young to know and understand true love and therefore confuses the two?

• The Title of Brighton Rock is chosen by Greene as analogy for human nature; the idea that human’s never change. With this pessimistic view in mind do you think that people can only be born good or that that they have the free will to change? Can we blame experiences in his youth and the poverty into which Pinkie was born on the development of evil within him when Rose herself is from a similar background and is clearly not evil?

• How far would you agree that the novel is not so much about Brighton, as about heaven and hell?

• To what extent do you think this book is about guilt?

Other Books by Graham Greene

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  A Burnt Out Case

  Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of ind…

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  A Gun For Sale

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  A Sense Of Reality

  A collection of four stories comprising ` Under The Garden’ (A short novel); `A…

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  A Sort Of Life

  Graham Green was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes – six children, eve…

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  Brighton Rock

  Graham Greene’s classic study in the banality of evil is set in the unforge…

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  Collected Essays Of Graham…

  ‘In childhood all books of divination… and like the fortune teller who sees a…

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Suggested Further Reading

• Heart of Darkness ~ Joseph Conrad
• The Thirty-Nine Steps ~ John Buchan
• The Unconsoled ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
• John Le Carré
• Brighton Rock film (1947) starring Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Nigel Stock