I never thought I'd be saying I enjoyed a Graham Greene book. After being forced to read a truly bleak passage from one of his books during my a-level English studies I was convinced I'd never read anything from this dreary author again if I could help it.
And then I gave him another go, and it turns out I must have had to read a really rubbish part of his writing because I was hooked from the very first line of Brighton Rock. As it turns out, I'm a fan and I now want to read all his other works.
The book takes place in Brighton, but imagine less of the fun vibe, and more of a rainy murderous one. Charles 'Fred' Hale is a journalist come to Brighton to hand out newspaper cards as part of a competition. Having previously written an article that resulted in the leader of a local mob's death however, Hale begins to realise he's unsafe.
On the other side of the tracks we have Pinkie, the new teenage leader of the gang. Desperate to prove that he's not just a kid, and to keep the mob in control, he becomes ever more dangerous as the book progresses.
And completing our circle of three, we have Ida Arnold, who met Fred on the day he was killed, and who's the only one determined to track down his killer, or even to find out what happened to him at all.
This murder thriller had me gripped and felt like the ultimate Bugsy Malone style mob fiction. Greene managed to make the whole book so cleverly vivid that I feel like I can still imagine some of the scenes and the characters, without it having been too wordy. Set in the 1930s, I found this really hard to place time-wise as I was reading, as it almost seem to exist outside of time.
There were a couple of bits where the narrative slowed down a little too much for me, and I could never really connect with Hale, so I'm giving it 4 out of 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment