I somehow forgot how stunning Graham Greene’s writing is, this quickly reminded me. Both thriller and glorious words. Besides, it contains descriptions like this, one of the bits of London I love, and is no longer like this at all:
Ida came up from Charing Cross Station, into the hot and windy light in the Strand flickering on the carburetors; in an upper room of Stanley Gibbons a man with a long grey Edwardian moustache sat in a window examining a postage stamp through a magnifying glass; a great dray laden with barrels stamped by, and the fountains played in Trafalgar Square, a cool translucent flower blooming and dropping into the drab sooty basins…. In Seven Dials the negroes were hanging round the public house doors in tight natty suitings and old school ties, and Ida recognized one of them and passed the time of day. (37-38)
I loved too, the main protagonist, Ida. She was the one pushing the action forward, investigating and uncovering the truth. She’s usually the woman seen regularly (but not too regularly) who helps the noir private eye hold it all together, the loose woman who likes a drink, enjoys every sensual minute of life, and has a heart of gold beneath what some might consider a bit of a rough exterior. Here she gets centre stage, she stands for life and decency in contrast to the death all around her. She stands a bit outside that limiting equation of poverty vs wealth, misery vs content. She moves between worlds, between peoples, between cities. She is not trapped, either in her circumstances or in her own head.
It makes her a bit terrifying to those who are. She gets her way too, her version of justice for a man she only briefly met, but who recognised her worth.
There’s this too, not something you associate with Brighton, but poverty is there as well as here. Poverty that can only be fled from but can never be fully left behind:
The Boy crossed over towards the Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty too him back: a shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker’s who worked in oak, elm or lead: no window-dressing but one child’s coffin dusty with disuse and the list of hairdressing prices. The Salvation Army citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recognition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. (140)
How many colons and semi-colons! How much sad and petty violence, a world that cannot be broken out of. A world created within the confines of misery and a single room shared by a family and a burden of fear and shame. A world lived in parallel to holiday crowds as much as to the higher echelons of underworld life able to take a slightly larger view. You are glad it is being torn down, aware that the new building will probably just recreate it.
Outside is life, outside is Ida, implacably looking for what is fair and just. And enjoying it.
Still, the undertones of heredity and environmental determinism are rather disturbing and so this is no simple triumph of life. The Boy’s unfortunate wife of only a few days, unsuccessfully fleeing the same inescapable world that he was and as unable to see the true horizon, is possibly pregnant, and the last line of the book is this:
She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all. (247)
[Graham Greene (1938, 1971) Brighton Rock. St Ives: Clay Ltd.]