Brighton Rock - Quotes Flashcards
Charles Hale p4
“He only felt his loneliness after his third gin; until then he despised the crowd, but afterwards he felt this kinship. He had come out of the same streets, but he was condemned by his higher pay to pretend to want other things, and all the time the piers, the peepshows pulled at his heart. He wanted to get back - but all he could do was to carry his sneer along the front, the badge of loneliness.”
Charles Hale is in Brighton distributing cards for the Messanger’s Kolly Kibber contest. He observes the Witsun crowd, convinced he will soon be killed. Hale despises much about himself. He is skinny and unattractive and a shabby dresser. He takes pride, however, in his job and his professional success. He has worked his way up from newspaper deliveryman to reporter and has left his past in Brighton behind. That past comes back to him when he returns to the report town on assignment. In Brighton, he is forced to confront his former self, the man who enjoyed peep shows and tourist traps. He can’t connect to that self in an authentic way, though, and his pride results mostly in loneliness and feelings of isolation.
Pinkie Brown p47
“The imagination hadn’t awoken. That was his strength. He couldn’t see through other people’s eyes, or feel their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy, the catgut vibrating in the heart; it was like nerves losing their freshness, it was like age coming on, other people’s experience battering on the brain.”
Pinkie, having ordered the murder of Hale and started his campaign of wooing Rose, is waiting on the Brighton Pier for her to appear so he can take her on their first date. Pinkie is not often burdened by feelings of empathy. That is a strength in his line of work because heading one of the town’s horse race gangs requires that he be of ease with killing and casual violence. Pinkie was raised a Catholic though, and music, regardless of genre, reminds him of the hymns of his youth and the promises he made as a boy to follow God’s commandments. They also remind him of how many of those commandments he has broken in his short time as a gangster.
Pinkie, Rose p53
“The inhuman voice whistled round the gallery and the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I’ll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he would never get mixed up, the music had its own retort at hand: ‘You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way.”
Pinkie and Rose are on there first date at Sherry’s nightclub and Pinkie is fingering the bottle of Vitriol, or sulfuric acid, in his pocket, which he keeps around for emergencies. A voice speaks to him as he does so, warning him that the acid, which Pinkie intends to use on his enemies, will end up hurting him instead. The music playing in the club mixes with the odd and otherworldly voice, which suggests to Pinkie that the acid is fated to disfigure his own face. Later, on the cliff near Peacehaven, Pinkie will spill acid on himself and run off the cliff to his death.
Colleoni, Pinkie Brown p66
“‘You are wasting your time, my child,’ Mr Colleoni said. ‘You can’t do me any harm.’ He laughed gently. ‘If you want a job though, come to me. I like push. I dare say I could find room for you. The World needs young people with energy.’ The hand with the cigar moved expansively, mapping out the world as Mr Colleoni visualized it: lots of little electric clocks controlled by Greenwich, buttons on a desk, a good suite on the first floor, accounts audited, reports from agents, silver, cutlery, glass.”
Pinkie is at the Cosmopolitan hotel to meet with Colleoni, at the older man’s invitation. Colleoni tells Pinkie hat there is nothing he can do to hurt Colleoni’s buisness; he is too powerful. But, Colleoni suggests, Pinkie might come to work for him. The proud Pinkie is offended by such a notion, hoping to be rise to the ranks of Colleoni someday. Greene’s language suggests that Pinkie’s aspirations are nothing more than pipe dreams. The world belongs to men like Colleoni whose immense power allows them to purchase not only a wide array of expensive goods, but also property, influence and time itself.
Pinkie Brown, Rose p93
“He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine offered that one would never, never take; one would die first - or let others die. The chalky dust blew up around the windows.”
Pinkie and Rose are on the bus towards Peaceheaven, where Pinkie hopes to continue his selfish wooing of Rose. The way he looks at her suggests that, contrary to what he would like to believe, he needs her. Her sex and essential goodness have the power to heal him, if he could see beyond his pride, his curdled celibacy, and his desire to save his own skin above all things. The dust blowing up around the windows is a reminder of Pinkie’s aloneness in the world, and it harkens back to Hale’s ashes falling from the crematorium towers. By refusing to open himself to the possibility of love with Rose, Pinkie is dooming himself to at least one kind of death: the death of the heart.
Pinkie Brown, Rose p95
“They lay on the chalk bank side by side with a common geography and a little hate mixed with his contempt. He thought he had made his escape, and here his home was: back beside him, making claims”
On the cliff at Peacehaven, Rose tells Pinkie that she is from Nelson Place, a poverty-stricken area that border’s Pinkie’s equally downtrodden boyhood home of Paradise Piece. Pinkie is a striver and a dreamer. He has hoped that, through crime, he could leave behind the shame of his poverty and rise to the ranks of mob kings like Colleoni. Rose’s presence is a constant reminder of where he came from and what he had always hoped to overcome. Now, thanks to the need to cover up Hale’s murder, Pinkie feels like he is right back where he started. In this way, class is figured as a kind of predestined state which cannot be escaped.
Rose (speaker, Ida Arnold p131
“Driven to her hole the small animal peered out at the bright and breezy world; in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity and the love and fear of God, but the small animal had not the knowledge to deny that only in the glare and open world outside was something which people called experience”
Ida has once again come to Snow’s to question Rose. Ida corners the young woman, following her up to her apartment above the cafe and forcing the door open. Ida tells Rose that Pinkie doesn’t love her and is only courting her to avoid being prosecuted for Hale’s murder, but Rose tells Ida she doesn’t care if Pinkie loves her. She loves him, and that is what matters. Ida does not comprehend the desolate nature of Rose’s background. Having grown up surrounded by nothing but ugliness and poverty, Rose sees a future with Pinkie not as a punishment but as a way out.
Pinkie Brown (speaker), Ida, Rose p135
“She was good, he’d discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other.”
Pinkie walks in on Ida questioning Rose in her room, He is immediately impressed with Rose’s composure and bravery under pressure. While watching Rose avoid Ida’s well-laid traps, he has an epiphany: he and Rose are made for each other. She is completely good; he is evil. Together, they could make a whole. Perhaps he believes Rose can be his redemption, saving him from damnation. This realisation doesn’t mean that he loves Rose or has learned to measure her worth independant of his own wants, however. He still sees her as being useful to him. He is counting on her essential goodness to save him.
Rose (Speaker), Pinkie p249
“It was said to be the worst act of all, the act of despair, the sin without forgiveness; sitting there in the smell of petrol she tried to realize despair. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn’t damn him without damning her too. There was nothing he could do, she wouldn’t do: she felt
capable of sharing any murder. A light lit his face and left it; a frown, a thought, a child’s face. She felt responsibility move in
her breasts; she wouldn’t let him go into that darkness alone.”
Pinkie is driving to Peacehaven so that he and Rose might fulfil a suicide pact, the details of which they discussed previously when he confessed to her that there were men in the world who wanted him dead. His plan is to give Rose his gun so that she might shoot herself first. Then he will flee the scene. Rose is ignorant of the fact that Pinkie doesn’t plan to hold up his end of the bargain. She is drowning in
romanticized ideas of sin and damnation, and thinks it would be beautiful to join Pinkie in his downward spiral. Her love for Pinkie has turned her religious beliefs upside down, and he has become her God. She worships him and confuses absolute loyalty to him with goodness and devotion to what is holy and right.
Pinkie Brown, Rose (end of text)
“She was sixteen, but this was how she might have looked after years of marriage, of the childbirth and the daily quarrel: they had reached death and it affected them like age.”
Rose is in the Peacehaven pub, composing the suicide note she promised Pinkie she would write. Pinkie returns from the bathroom to find two young men eyeing Rose and he is torn between a possessive affection for her and a feeling of shock at her worn looks. Just as he worried that life with Rose would turn him into his father, he sees her as a mother and a woman made ragged by the daily tedium of decades of
poverty. Greene points out that Rose has been aged by the burden of the suicide pact. Near death, she has the face and demeanor of an old woman.
Pinkie, Rose (end of text)
“While Pinkie found the money, she was visited by an
almost overwhelming rebellion—she had only to go out, leave him, refuse to play. He couldn’t make her kill herself: life wasn’t as bad as that. It came like a revelation, as if someone had whispered to her that she was someone, a separate
creature—not just one flesh with him. She could always
escape—if he didn’t change his mind. Nothing was decided. They could go in the car wherever he wanted them to go; she could take the gun from his hand, and even then—at the last moment of all—she needn’t shoot. Nothing was decided—there was always hope.”
While on the final drive to the cliff near Peacehaven, Rose
regains her previous understanding of Catholicism and religion. She discards her fixation on damnation and grasps at hope, and it is this inner rebellion that suggests that Rose is beginning to
separate herself from Pinkie. She realizes that she is not of his body; she has her own body and her own mind to save. She wants to save Pinkie as well, of course, but he is beyond help. He clings to despair, and it is only when Rose follows him into this darkness that the lovers are able to feel connected.
Allowing herself to believe
in a different life for herself represents Rose’s first real
assertion of herself in the novel.
Rose (speaker), Pinkie (end of text)
“An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something
trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the
glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St.
Pancras waiting-room, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast—whatever it was—got in, God knows what it would do.
He had a sense of huge havoc—the confession, the penance and the sacrament—and awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain.
Pinkie is overcome with feelings of guilt and dread as he drives Rose to the cliff to fulfil the suicide pact. The
monster beating against the car windows is his own guilt,
and he asks for God to grant him peace. He is instead visited by memories of his bitterly poor childhood, as well as visions of Judy and Dallow in sin. He recalls “the cold unhappy moment on the pier,” suggesting that perhaps he regrets making the angry recording, or perhaps simply that he regrets marrying Rose. The rain is not the only force that is blinding him in this moment. Pinkie has always been incapable of seeing and appreciating Rose’s love for him, and he has yet to face the fact that his actions are to blame for his bleak and desperate circumstances. He has no desire to repent or confess. To do either would be to admit his culpability, and that would only distract him from his purpose: convincing Rose to kill herself so that he might
finally be free.
Charles Hale, Ida Arnold p14
“She smelt of soap and wine: comfort and peace and a slow sleepy physical enjoyment, a touch of the nursery and the mother, stole from the big tipsy mouth, the magnificent breasts and legs, and reached Hale’s withered and frightened and bitter little brain.”
Charles Hale is fleeing Pinkie and his gang, seeking
company and comfort in Ida, whose curvaceous body he
finds attractive. She seems to exude femininity and fertility,
and thus also a sense of motherliness. Hale is torn between sexual desire for Ida and a need for motherly protection as he fears for his life. Ida’s air of vitality and fertility contrasts directly with Hale’s withered impotence. Greene is hinting that Hale is not long for this world, while Ida will remain stubbornly and vividly alive. For the rest of the novel, Ida’s character will continue to be associated with feminine vitality and love for life.
Ida (speaker), Hale p35
“She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. People passing up the
flowery suburban road looked up and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces. Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.”
Ida has left Hale’s sparsely attended and impersonal funeral service and ruminates on the fact that the ash flowing from the towers of the crematorium is all that is left of Hale. It is also all that remains of his pride and ambition. In this scene,
Ida, often called “Lily” by her fellow bar patrons, is
represented by the pink blossoms. Her vitality—and her desire to get to the bottom of the circumstances
surrounding Hale’s death—is in full bloom. Hale, on the
other hand, is nothing more than stray ash. Ida weeps for
Hale but also for humanity in general, since she knows that
Hale’s sad fate is what ultimately awaits everyone.
Pinkie (speaker), Rose
‘ “Of course it’s true,” the Boy said. “What else could there
be?” he went scornfully on. “Why,” he said, “it’s the only
thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of
course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,” he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, “torments.” “And Heaven too,” Rose said with anxiety while the rain fell
interminably on. “Oh, maybe,” the Boy said, “maybe.” ‘
Pinkie and Rose discover early on in their courtship that
they are both Catholics and, while they share a basic belief
in God and Catholic doctrine, their different perceptions of
God could not be more different. A violent killer, Pinkie believes in Hell, and sees God as a wrathful entity who doles out damnation as a punishment for sin. Rose, by contrast, is a kind and giving soul, and believes in Heaven and a God who has endless mercy for all sinners. It is Pinkie’s dark vision of God that allows him to kill indiscriminately and
Rose’s gentler faith that leads her into falling in love with
Pinkie in the first place.
