{"id":329,"date":"2011-11-14T10:06:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T10:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2011\/11\/brighton-rock\/"},"modified":"2011-11-14T10:06:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T10:06:00","slug":"brighton-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2011\/11\/brighton-rock.html","title":{"rendered":"Brighton Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/a><\/div>\n

I\u2019m re-reading Graham Greene\u2019s novel Brighton Rock<\/i>\u00a0as research for an article for Joseph Pearce in StAR magazine. As usual, Greene explores the dark corners of the human heart in a thought provoking and disturbing manner. It\u2019s like he\u2019s poking the bottom of a clear and beautiful forest pond in order to stir up all the muck and muddy the water. On purpose.<\/p>\n

Pinkie is a seventeen year old gangster in the 1930s British sea side town of Brighton. He\u2019s a virgin. He doesn\u2019t drink or smoke or gamble. But he\u2019s also a murderer and a Catholic. Pinkie is a portrait in pure evil, and he\u2019s being tracked down by a cheerful, bosomy worldly woman called Ida who drinks too much, fornicates happily in the seedy hotels (\u201cIt don\u2019t do anybody no harm.\u201d) gambles recklessly on the horses but she \u201cBelieves in justice\u201d and \u201cknows right from wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what\u2019s got me puzzled: is there a difference between \u2018right and wrong\u2019 and \u2018good and evil\u2019? Pinkie\u2019s innocent girlfriend Rose is also a Catholic, and it is as if she and Pinkie exist on a different plane from all the other characters. They don\u2019t deal in questions of \u2018right and wrong\u2019. They deal in questions of \u2018good and evil.\u2019 They deal in the currency of damnation and salvation.<\/p>\n

Ida is a conventionally moral person. She believes in law and order and rules and regulations, but she has no regard and not a flicker of understanding for the deeper morality of the divine law expressed in the Catholic faith. She\u2019s an upright person. Maybe she would claim to be a Methodist or CofE (Church of Everybody) She\u2019s self righteous in her way, and would never dream that (from Pinkie and Rose\u2019s Catholic point of view) that she is just as much enmeshed in mortal sin as Pinkie is.<\/p>\n

This is, perhaps, the simple genius of Graham Greene\u2019s tortured stories: he shows characters operating according to this other, stranger set of rules\u2013the rules of the Catholic faith\u2013rules that do not replace the social \u2018right and wrong\u2019 that Ida understands\u2013but rules that go above them and take simple human morality into a new dimension.<\/p>\n

In this way Greene reveals something about being Catholic that is very hard to define\u2013the sense that within Catholicism one is living the ordinary life that everyone else leads\u2013but with a different perspective on everything\u2013a stranger dimension\u2013a dimension that has greater responsibilities, greater consequences and greater joys.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m re-reading Graham Greene\u2019s novel Brighton Rock\u00a0as research for an article for Joseph Pearce in StAR magazine. As usual, Greene explores the dark corners of the human heart in a thought provoking and disturbing manner. It\u2019s like he\u2019s poking the bottom of a clear and beautiful forest pond in order to stir up all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBrighton Rock<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I'm re-reading Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock as research for an article for Joseph Pearce in StAR magazine. 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