Between the Stirrup and the Ground

Brighton Rock

by Graham Greene

1938, Penguin Classics

I first read Graham Greene during my freshman year of college. I spent at the time many weekend mornings checking out books from the Boston Public Library and sitting in the Public Gardens reading for some hours. I remember reading Greene's The End of the Affair in a quite old edition in the fall that year.

So it was with pleasure that I decided to return to Greene at a friend's suggestion. We were at a get-together where Donnie Darko was shown and we both got excited at the scene where Drew Barrymore teaches her English class Greene's story "The Destructors", which both of us loved. She suggested that I borrow her copy of Brighton Rock. We met for drinks later that week and removed the lovely Penguin Classics and as we fawned over the beautiful uncut pages and the jacket flaps, she dropped it into her margarita.

Greene's prose fascinates me. His plots are endlessly palatable and his prose is clean and muscular. Yet, the nearly cinematic tightness of the plot barely conceals churning undercurrents of doubt about human nature and spirituality. Similarly, for all the effectiveness of his sentences ("His room smelt of stale beer") he is not averse to utilizing' the more poetic of his writerly powers ("The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes").

Brighton Rock, a thriller set in 1930s coastal England, is certainly faithful to both of my ideas about Greene.

The plot of the book is quite engaging. It concerns a gang of hoodlums who murder a newspaper man in the first chapter of the book and their attempts to conceal the crime. An ambitious but naive member of the gang, a young man named Pinkie, becomes over-involved in the process of covering his tracks and his blood lust grows increasingly throughout the novel.

Pinkie is pursued by an unlikely, but dogged, heroine in the form of a lush with conventionally loose morals, Ida. Ida's interest stems from spending an afternoon with the newspaper man before he died and she becomes more involved as Pinkie begins courting a young girl named Rose who may divulge details that would implicate him in the murder.

Through these three characters, Greene explores ideas of religiosity and morality. Pinkie's blood lust becomes increasingly myopic and rageful as the novel progresses. Greene writes him as an amoral child disgusted by sex. He is immature and it is his murder that increasingly lends him confidence and maturity.

Greene contrasts Pinkie's commitment to unholy acts with Rose's Catholic devotion. Rose is likewise written as naive for her sixteen years. Rose attends Mass regularly and is motivated by aspirations toward domesticity which are dashed repeatedly by the cynical Pinkie. Rose is devoted to Pinkie and takes up his defense seemingly as an act of religious devotion. As her devotion to Pinkie's love (which is largely an act of faith on her part, not unlike her former religious mindset) grows, she realizes his guilt in the crimes that guide the plot and, by extension, realizes that her love of god and of Pinkie are mutually exclusive.

Rose and Pinkie are married in a ceremony both regard as a fraud. The wedding, while legally binding, is absent the emotional and cultural trappings of marriage. Rose decides that she is living in mortal sin and rather than denounce her life, decides her sin is too great for an act of contrition to remedy. As such, Rose commits herself fully to her life of sin.

Thoughts of repentance also cross Pinkie's mind as he wonders about the cosmic ramifications of his crimes. Pinkie's contemplation of mortality and morality frames itself in the phrase "between the stirrup and the ground".

Pinkie's cynicism prevents him from considering the afterlife a reward for earthly goodness. As he remarks to himself, "Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust." Sin is derived from an ability to make sense of the world, or to control one's 'destiny'. Pinkie is invigorated by his powers over mortality and is mystified by imagining religious consequences for his actions.

Rose, on the other hand, is so overwhelmingly motivated by her faith in religious consequence that as she begins to stumble towards the path of sin, she entirely disavows her life of faithfulness. Rose views her own soul as irredeemable and as such is able to disregard any moral compunction she experiences. She contemplates her fate as she prepares to commit even more mortal sin:

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil - he tempted her to virtue like a sin... Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions - "you can plead for him at the throne of Grace" - came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful.

Both Pinkie and Rose are damned by their inability to frame religious warnings in their own life experiences. For Rose, Pinkie represents a physical actuality in which she can trust more powerful than the god in which she previously placed that trust; moreover, Pinkie can receive her adoration concretely in ways her deity cannot. For Pinkie, his inability to imagine a physical manifestation of faith is proof of its insignificance. Pinkie instead invests his energy and faith in the murder that exhilarates him physically and emotionally.

What makes Brighton Rock a truly remarkable read is in Greene's creation of the character of Ida. Ida, unlike both of the children, is worldly and perhaps world-weary. Ida's experience has led her away from religion and towards instead a life of conventional sin. Despite her sexual freedom, Ida's moral compass guides her towards a sense of justice and protection of innocence.

Ida is untroubled by concerns of an afterlife, and instead has constructed her own belief system which Greene portrays as entirely superior to the Church's. Where Rose viewed one compromise of morality fatalistically, Ida views morality from a more subjective - and realistic - point of view. Ida's realism prevents her from viewing compromise as necessarily preempting goodness.

In contrast to Pinkie, Ida is also concerned with the time "between the stirrup and the ground" but she finds physical manifestation of the gift of life in sexual contact, in meaningful relationships, and in pursuing her sense of what's right.

Ultimately, Green's novel, while utterly compelling from a superficial stance of readability is quite complex intellectually. Pinkie and Rose represent the failure of Catholic dogma to account for the diversity and complexity of daily life so clearly exemplified by the brassy but steadfast Ida.