Rather Than Death, He Feared Being Seen Through

Brighton is a seaside town on the south coast of England. In summer, Londoners take the train down. There are amusement arcades, candyfloss, deckchairs on the shingle. And there is a particular sweet called Brighton rock — a stick of hard candy, pink and white, with the name of the town stamped through its core. You can break it anywhere. The letters are always there.

Graham Greene took the name of this sweet for the title of a novel he published in 1938, and the metaphor is almost too neat — the kind of thing a lesser writer might have been embarrassed by. But Greene was never embarrassed by neatness. He trusted the reader to see past the surface. There is a moment in the book where the idea is spoken aloud:

People change. — Oh, no they don’t. Look at me. I’ve never changed. It’s like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton.

The person being described is Pinkie Brown. He is seventeen years old. He runs a small gang in Brighton. By the time we meet him, he has already arranged one murder and is in the process of covering it up. Greene almost never calls him by name. He calls him “the Boy.” And there is something right about that — something that insists on his youth even as it refuses to grant him innocence.

Pinkie comes from a place called Paradise Piece, a slum that has already been torn down when the novel opens. The name is a joke, and not a kind one. Greene inverts Wordsworth — where the Romantic poet placed heaven around the newborn child, Greene writes that hell lay about Pinkie in his infancy. There was poverty, and there was violence, and there was the thing Pinkie can never shake: in a room at the bend of the stairs, every Saturday night, his parents. That memory curdled something in him permanently. He cannot bear to be touched. He flinches from intimacy the way other people flinch from pain.

The novel opens with one of the great first sentences in English. Hale, a newspaper reporter, arrives in Brighton knowing he is going to be killed. He had once betrayed the gang’s former leader, a man named Kite, and now Pinkie — Kite’s successor, still practically a child — wants him dead. The killing is carried out. The police see nothing suspicious. But a woman who’d spent an idle afternoon with Hale in a pub — a woman named Ida Arnold, stout-drinking, big-hearted, fond of men and fortune-telling boards — senses that something is wrong. She decides to find out what happened.

Ida is the closest thing the novel has to a straightforwardly good character. She is brave, she is warm, she has a strong sense of justice. She believes in right and wrong. She says so often, and with great confidence. And for a long time, reading the novel, you assume she is the moral centre of the thing — the one whose view you are meant to share.

But Greene does not quite see it that way. There is a scene, about halfway through, where Ida confronts Rose — the sixteen-year-old waitress Pinkie has married in order to stop her testifying against him — and tries to make her see reason. The exchange is brief, and it cracks the novel open:

“I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn’t teach you that at school.”

Rose didn’t answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods — Good and Evil.

Right and Wrong, capitalised. Good and Evil, capitalised. They look like the same thing but they are not. Right and Wrong belong to the social world — to courts, to common sense, to the kind of person who knows instinctively that murder is bad and kindness is good. Good and Evil belong somewhere else entirely. They are theological. They are absolute. They deal not in behaviour but in the soul.

Greene once said that the real subject of the novel was the contrast between the ethical mind and the religious mind. I think this is true, but what makes the novel so uncomfortable is the direction of his sympathy. He does not side with Ida. He respects her, perhaps. But he does not think she has access to the things that matter most. She has never had to confront the possibility that her soul is at stake. Pinkie has. Rose has. They are both Catholics, both from the same ruined streets, both intimate with a darkness that Ida — cheerful, secular, humane — has never needed to face. They are, in their wretched way, more serious than she is.

This is hard to accept. It is meant to be.

Pinkie believes in hell with complete certainty. When Rose asks him, his answer is chilling not because it is fanatical but because it is calm:

“Of course it’s true,” the Boy said. “What else could there be?… These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,” he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water… “torments.”

“And Heaven too,” Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.

“Oh, maybe,” the Boy said, “maybe.”

There is a line elsewhere that says it plainly:

Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.

He does not doubt hell. He doubts heaven. He has chosen damnation the way a man might choose a country to live in — not with joy, but with a kind of grim familiarity. It is the only landscape he recognises.

Rose, meanwhile, loves him. This is the part of the novel that is hardest to sit with. She knows, or comes to know, that Pinkie married her only to keep her quiet. She suspects he is a murderer. None of it matters. She loves him with the desperate, undiscriminating love of someone who has been given nothing — no warmth, no attention, no future — and who seizes the first thing that resembles care, even though it does not. She is willing to be damned alongside him. She says so. The narrator confirms it:

She hadn’t been afraid to commit mortal sin — it was death, not damnation, which was scaring her.

And here is the thing that makes the novel’s architecture so strange: Pinkie, who has killed without remorse, is more frightened by this marriage than by anything else he has done. Not because of the commitment, or the intimacy, though he dreads both. Because the marriage was civil, not religious. In his understanding of the world, a murder can be confessed and absolved. A marriage outside the Church cannot. It is permanent damage to the soul. Secular law is trivial — prison is finite. But the law of the Church is the law of eternity.

The novel ends, as it must, badly. Pinkie’s gang falls apart. He kills another of his own men. Ida closes in. Cornered, he takes Rose to a cliff and gives her a gun, telling her they will die together, though he has no intention of dying himself. He only wants her to go first. Then Ida arrives, and the police. In the confusion, the bottle of vitriol Pinkie keeps in his pocket shatters against his face. He goes over the edge.

Seventeen. Acid on his skin. The sea below.

After his death, Rose goes to confession. She tells the priest she had wanted to die with Pinkie, to share in his damnation. And the priest — an old man, tired, gentle — does something remarkable. He does not correct her. He does not lecture. He tells her about a Frenchman:

“There was a man, a Frenchman… He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul should suffer damnation… I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was a saint.”

The Frenchman was Charles Péguy. Greene returned to him again and again — a Catholic who refused the sacraments, who would not marry in the Church, because he could not accept that anyone, however wicked, should be condemned forever. If any soul goes to hell, Péguy said, then so do I. It is either the highest form of love or the deepest form of pride, and the novel does not tell you which.

Then the priest says the line that has trailed after Greene like a shadow for nearly a century:

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Appalling. That is the word. Not beautiful, not reassuring. Appalling. Whatever the mercy of God is, it is not something designed for human comfort. It operates, if it operates at all, at a scale we cannot reach and by rules we cannot follow. It may extend to Pinkie. The priest does not say it does. He only says we cannot know.

Rose leaves the church. She is going home to play a record — a message Pinkie once recorded for her in an amusement-arcade booth. She has never listened to it. She has kept it all this time, believing it to be a declaration of love.

It is not. What Pinkie recorded was contempt, cut off mid-sentence by the machine’s time limit.

Greene’s last line:

She walked rapidly in the thin June sunshine towards the worst horror of all.

That is where the novel stops. We do not hear the record with her. We are left outside, knowing what she does not — or not yet.

There is a phrase that recurs six times in the book, from a sixteenth-century couplet:

Between the stirrup and the ground, he mercy sought and mercy found.

A rider falling from a horse. The instant before impact. Even then, the poem says, mercy is possible. The novel keeps returning to this thought, turning it over, never settling.

The recording was cut off mid-word. What comes after that last syllable is silence. Whether the silence holds nothing, or whether something almost broke through in Pinkie’s voice at the very end — some reflex he could not name and would have denied — we cannot say.

The 1947 film changed the ending. The needle sticks. It plays only the fragment “I love you,” over and over. Rose believes that was the whole message. Greene did not approve. But there is something in that accidental repetition — something about the possibility that even inside an act of hatred, the world might catch on one stray syllable of tenderness and wear it into a groove.

Whether that is the mercy of God or just a broken machine is not a question the novel cares to resolve.

Greene converted to Catholicism at twenty-two. Not out of faith — out of curiosity. He wanted to understand the woman he was going to marry. Years later, he called himself a Catholic agnostic. Then a Catholic atheist. He said he had lost faith but kept belief, though what he meant by belief seemed closer to longing — the hope, against all evidence, that it might be true. He also said:

I have small belief in the doctrine of eternal punishment.

Yet he wrote a novel that takes eternal punishment more seriously than almost anything else in English fiction. Perhaps that is the point. The question of damnation burns hottest in someone who cannot quite bring himself to believe in it, because for him it is never settled, never safe, never something he can file away and forget.

He stood in the gap between the stirrup and the ground, and he stayed there.

Brighton Rock is a novel about a stick of candy with the same word running through it from end to end. You bite down, and it is always there. But by the time you finish the book, you are no longer sure what the word is.