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Thursday, August 17, 2017

Greene's Brighton Rock as religious allegory?

If one didn't know that Graham Greene had converted to Catholicism and had written at least one overtly "Catholic" novel (The Power and the Glory), you'd - or I'd - read his other novels differently. That is, would readers group The End of the Affair, for ex., as a "religious" novel? Doubt it. Yesterday I started reading Brighton Rock (1938), one of the GG novels I'd never read, and note that it is sometimes grouped among his "religious" novels (GG himself clearly distinguished in lists of his works between "novels" and "entertainments," such as Our Man in Havana, which stands up well as both, in my view). So that will be in my mind as I read through - though it doesn't start out as a religious novel in any conventional sense. The beginning is a little tricky: We meet a man, Hale, working as promoter for an English newspaper by distributing prize money in the seaside resort of Brighton - but he's wanted man, and in the first chapter most of his efforts involve trying to escape notice by his pursuers. We don't learn what they want from him, but apparently it has something to do w/ gambling debts. No matter. Though the first chapter would let us think the novel will be about Hale and his flight from assailants, as it happens they catch him and kill him in between chapters 1 and 2 - and the novel settles down into a different course: The main character seems to be a middle-aged woman, Ida, whom Hale flirted w/ while he was being pursued. She wonders why he abandoned her as she went into the ladies' room, and when she learns from news accounts that he died - supposedly of a heart attack - she becomes suspicious and begins investigating his death. She's the most unlikely of amateur sleuths, but so be it - the novel is off and running so to speak. Perhaps we can make a religio-allegorical leap and see her quest for information as much like a pilgrim's search for truth and salvation? If so, she starts off on the wrong course, using some kind of ouija board to get a "message" from the now-cremated Hale: This would be entrusting false idols, when the true devotee would need to trust in The Word. We'll see how this develops.

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