The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

I used to read one book at a time. It kept me on task, and even if it was boring, knowing that I had something up later caused me to push on and get it over with.

That’s all well and good when one seems to have all the time in the world, but when I hit middle age I became more stingy with my time. Books must earn my attention. I no longer practice hate-reading.

All that ended with research for Long Live Death. Many of my sources were not conducive to reading in bed and I often needed to take notes and place a bookmark, which is awkward when one is dozing off. That was when I began having a “bedtime book” and I’ve continued that as I dive deeper into Catholic theology.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was my most recent bedtime book. It came to me from a friend who was cleaning out his bookshelves and heard I liked Greene’s work. Like most Americans, I figured Brighton Rock was a place, not a candy. I knew Brighton was the seaside resort in England, but that’s about it.

This edition of the book has notes in the back for “American readers” that lays out that information, and it is helpful. Thanks to the internet, one can do even further and find photos of Brighton Rock candy, and see that it’s basically a straight candy-cane and that it is build in such a way that the words “Brighton Rock” appear on both ends and indeed run clean through the stick. One of the characters makes a play on this.

The story is about a petty gangster trying to defend his territory, and like all of Greene’s work, it is infused with religious influences. Greene is known as a Catholic writer, but while he was indeed Catholic, he felt that religion moves everyone, and if his novels had more Catholics than, say, Hindus, that’s because he was writing what he knew.

It’s a well-crafted story, though the portrait of the seedy underworld is somewhat distasteful and the novel comes perilously close to “nasty people doing nasty things to each other” territory.

Greene’s too good a writer to fall into that trap, however, and the ending has a nice twist and not one but two Chekhov’s guns.

The tale’s greatest weakness is that it is all but impenetrable to most American readers. It was written in 1938 and it shows it. I would bet that just about all the geography painstakingly described by Greene is gone. What World War II didn’t obliterate subsequent development probably did. He clearly assumes that such a major tourist destination was well known, and writes accordingly, but it’s completely lost on Americans nearly a century later.

And then there’s the dialog, which is Cockney gangster slang. Greene does very little exposition, leaving the story to tell itself, and while there are internal monologues, he does not explain much of anything. It’s just all out there.

All of which is to say that even before finishing it, I was going back and looking up prior scenes to figure out what was meant. I enjoyed it, but it’s hard for me to recommend it. As long-time readers know, I’m a particular fan of Evelyn Waugh as well as Ford Madox Ford, and so I’m used to the English slang of the 1930s, but this was still a stretch.