Just finished reading Brighton Rock for English (just in time, too, I needed it finished by tomorrow) and I thought it might be worth sharing my opinions on it...
It's awful.
No no, I obviously have more to say on it than that, but my overall review can be effectively summed up in two words, and that's never good. In fact, I could easily drop the 'it's' so now it's in real trouble.
Elaborating on my point a little more...
The storyline is weak and dull and the author adds a depressing pessimistic edge to try and make up for it, and it doesn't make it any better.
The characters are so furiously hateable that I could feel next to no sympathy for any of them, and I think if I had it would have had a bigger impact on me at the end than just a long, quiet 'meh'. I also hated how the 'good' character is so annoying I started to hope she would die as quickly and unneccesarily brutally as possible (and it wasn't exactly outside the nature of the book for that to happen). It was also irritating to see Greene try and give the characters flaws. There's nothing wrong with giving characters flaws, in fact, I'm all for it, but he just kept going on about it, like I didn't catch it the first time. I knew Pinkie was a virgin the first time you said it, it wasn't necessary to mention it at every possible opportunity, that's just embarrassing him.
Above all, and this is something that really bothers me because it's considered a 'classic' and people think it's such a wonderful book: it's badly written. The narrative is lifeless and it drags. Twice I was sitting in the common room trying furiously to keep my eyes open during an 'intense' scene in a 'thriller' novel. There was no thrill involved: show me the thrill. There were even errors in the writing: the author obviously has never heard of the wacky new trend of proof reading. I've only been writing for about three or four years and even I know you have to read through your work at least once before even considering giving it to a publisher (knowing me, I will have made some kind of mistake in this blog, just for irony's sake). I'm not sure why the publisher accepted it: maybe because the author had already published things before, and they just took it without a second's thought. Great. Also I think that no one ever told the author about the rule: when a new character is speaking, put their dialogue on a new line. It's hard enough to understand who's saying what when you refer to everybody as 'the Boy' or something along those lines, but when everything is dotted around everywhere it just confused me and it seriously broke the flow.
Basically, the whole book seemed like something was missing. I had the odd feeling that it was just one draft away from being an okay novel, but it just didn't cut it with me. The ending was also rather sudden and unsatisfying. I'm sure that's what the author was going for, fitting with the theme and all that, but I just think that Pinkie (the 'bad' character, who turned out to be the one I hated the least, funnily enough) deserved a better send-out than the one he got. Don't get me wrong, the character deserved everything he got, it's just that his last scene was weak to say the least.
In the end, all I can really say is that if I didn't have to read this for school, I would have given up about halfway through. There's only so much waffle I can handle, and I don't like forcing myself to like a book. Plenty of authors work hard to make their books good so I can like them without even trying: Stephen King, Elizabeth Laird, Kevin Brooks and Catherine Ford, Jane Austen, the list goes on. Basically: I don't care if a book is a classic, if it's terrible, I won't strain myself to like it. The authors are the ones getting paid to do the work, so they should do it properly.
Oh, and Greene obviously has an obsession with breasts. Seriously, they're everywhere in that book.
