Graham Greene

Came across an intelligent blog yesterday, Philosophy for Life, in particular a post on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which cited this novel as a foundational example of the poetics of seediness - noting GG's many descriptions of "seedy" dwellings and establishments on the s coast of England - blogger noted the roots of this poetics in works of Baudelaire. I think that's a profound observation but would prefer to call his milieu the poetics of tawdriness - as I think this novel is hardly seedy in comparison w many other 20th C novels and memoirs and I think tawdriness captures the sense of cheap entertainments and establishments mainly for the working-class "holiday makers" - the piers, the games of chance, the tea houses and huge cheap restaurants, the boarding houses. There's a class element to the milieu - seediness would be the drug dens a "gin joints" whereas tawdriness would be the shooting galleries and souvenir shops along the boardwalk. Both elements but particularly the seediness became essential to the noir crime fiction in the US, and I wonder whether GG influenced the later writing of Hammett and Chandler. Influence aside Brighton Rock is a powerful novel in part because of its sense of place - so many great scenes in the boarding house, along the Promenade and the piers, in the classy hotel (which snubs Pinkie aka The Boy), at rose's parents' house, even at the race track tho that scene is more for action than description. The long chapter in which pinkie and rose marry is especially powerful, w the wedding itself darkly comic and then their long perambulation through the "tawdry" seaside resort as pinkie- terrified of sex and revolted by rose - fearfully delays the inevitable. The religious aspect about which I've commented in earlier posts, pushes more to the forefront in these later chapters as it becomes more clear that pinkie is satanic and the he and ida - still trying to figure out who killed her casual acquaintance Hale - are in a struggle for rose's soul and her salvation.

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