Brighton rock

269 pages

English language

Published Nov. 10, 2011 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-09-954168-4
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OCLC Number:
756482071

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4 stars (1 review)

"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. Greene's gripping thriller exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'."--Back cover.

30 editions

reviewed Brighton rock by Graham Greene (Penguin twentieth-century classics)

Bleak and devastating

4 stars

Brutal psychological portraits of people we are not meant to love. A gang war with no glamour or illusions on either side. We begin to sympathize eventually with a somewhat pathetic and naive middle-aged woman, who lives for simple pleasures and takes no shame in lust. If virtue is to found in this world at all, she is the one who possesses it, and it gives her the strength she needs.

I found this a bit inaccessible, full of obscure-to-me midcentury British gangster slang, but well worth the effort.

Subjects

  • Murder
  • Fiction
  • Gangs

Places

  • Brighton (England)
  • England
  • Brighton