In a post on CrimeReads, writer Craig Nova examines Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock to share some of its important writing lessons, starting with his ability to create a sense of place.
“With Greene the details of the physical world of his novels are so constant, so informative that we have the notion that we have been to the places Greene describes,” Nova says. For example, Greene describes Brighton, an English seaside resort, like this: “The new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water coulour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, a flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.”
“These details validate the existence of Brighton in a way that is almost cinematic, but they do something else, too, which is that the accumulation of them have their own mood, their own emotional quality, which has an increasing power, if only because of the way they add up to a vision of a place,” Nova says.
Second, Greene creates an anticipation in the reader for information, and that satisfies that want while creating even greater anticipation. For example, at the beginning of Brighton Rock, the narrator suggests someone is coming to kill him. Soon enough, Greene introduces an adversary, but without explicitly stating that this is who has come to kill his protagonist. Instead, he describes the adversary in such a way that the reader instinctively knows they’ve encountered a villain and now wants to know his intentions.
