Brighton Rock (1938)
Author: Graham Greene
BLM Rating 9 / 10
Acquired at: Barwon Booksellers, Geelong
I want to start by saying, it has effectively taken me thirty five years to get around to reviewing this book. I first read it as spotty thirteen year old, back in 1979, during my first year of high school, in Worthing, Sussex, just a few months after having moved with my family from Brighton, (where I was born), along the coast twelve miles to Worthing. Back then, whilst I was already an avid reader, my taste in books, and frankly, my appreciation of them, was somewhat more limited than it is today. Consequently, whilst I remember enjoying it, if I'm honest I have little memory of there being any great impact on my life from having read it the first time.
If anything is a good reason to re-read something from one's childhood, then this book is it. A series of coincidental life experiences in the intervening years have led me to see
Brighton Rock as possibly one of my favourite novels of all time.. (with, of course, the usual caveat that favourites, for me, change at the speed of light...)
To appreciate my own personal journey of appreciation for this novel, one has to be given a little background. As I said, I was born in Brighton. I've always considered it my 'home' town, in spite of having not lived there for thirty five years. In the 1990s I began what became a twenty year obsession with researching my family history, a massive proportion of which it turned out, was based in and around Brighton and the surrounding area. My ancestors, the Crossfields, settled in Brighton in the late 18th century and some of them still live there today. My Paternal Grandmother, Doris Williams nee Crossfield, had no less than eight brothers who grew up in Brighton in the 1920s and 1930s, all of whom served their country in World War II. They grew up in Brighton's working class slums, just prior to many of those slums being cleared in the great social changes of that time period.
As if this wasn't enough to give me a personal connection to the novel, set, as it is, in the dark world of a young protagonist, born into poverty, trying to survive in that very period and place, there is more...
As well as the 1947, critically acclaimed screen portrayal of the story, (starring Richard Attenborough, who reprised the role of Pinkie Brown he had performed in the stage version three years earlier), there was a less well known remake in 2010. This version cleverly resets the story in 1960s Brighton, making use of the British awareness of the social phenomenon of the Mods and Rockers of that time period. I only watched this particular movie version a couple of weeks ago, and as someone who was into the whole Mod revival movement in my later teenage years, found yet another layer of connection to the story.
For a book review, I appreciate that this is very light on detail about the nature, plot, and detail of the story, but, in my (less than humble) opinion, you need to find those things out for yourself. It's dark. It's from an era you may not necessarily have any knowledge of yourself. It reflects a world of which you may know nothing, but you know what, that's what reading is good for. It broadens your horizons. It opens new perspectives.
On a personal level, what this book did was make me think more about who I am, where I came from, what my ancestors might have lived like. Fiction written in another time is an adventure of discovery. Discovery of a world we can never recapture, but that we can try to appreciate from our own perspective. No matter how self-indulgent that might be.
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