Brighton Rock and Sherlock Holmes: A Comparison
Brighton Rock and Sherlock Holmes: A Comparison
In this assignment I will be looking at the differences in writing style between Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and Arthur Conan-Doyle's The Man With The Twisted Lip.
The style of writing is the main difference that I see between the stories of Greene and Conan Doyle, and not in the plot; partly this is due to the half a century or so time difference between the pieces, Conan Doyle's, I guess in around 1890 (due to the date given at the start of The Man With The Twisted Lip, "it was in June '89") and Greene's written in 1938, although partly it is due to the different intentions of the authors.
The works of Conan Doyle were mainly popular, short stories written for a Victorian middle-class monthly periodical, "The Strand" written between 1887 and 1927, although most were written by 1903. Because of this, the structures on all levels, from plot to sentence, are simple, chronological and in the first person. Examples of this are "Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium." This is a simple statement to open the story with. It introduces a character, actually two, gives a little background information and tells us the point of the sentence, and the story (or so the reader thinks) at the end of the sentence in "was much addicted to opium".
The plot generally gives no depth to the characters and is a one-track plot due to the story being written in the first person and following the activities of one man. All of this is in striking contrast to Brighton Rock. In the first part of the novel there are three chapters. Greene's work is not in the first person but the third. This enables Greene to follow a multi-track plot, taking in the actions of three characters; chapter one begins with 'Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.' This shows Hale as the focus of the first chapter. Chapter two begins with, 'The boy paid his threepence and went through the turnstile.' Focussing attention on to 'the boy' or Pinkie. And chapter three begins with, 'Ida Arnold broke her way across the Strand'. Furthermore, where Conan Doyle is very sparing on his description, Greene lavishes in it: 'trams rocking down to the aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front.' Whereas Conan Doyle, writing as Dr. Watson, keeps it to the respectability of the place and its genteelness, much more important to a middle class Victorian than a clever simile, for example, 'Upper Swandam Lane is a vile alley...' the effect of this is to give the reader an impression of what the alley looks like in their minds, instead of the precise detail Greene employs, it is often cinematic. He did not have to produce a script for the film version, as Brighton Rock reads more like one.
One would not expect to find an author looking to join the ranks of world literature simply writing 'potboiler' short stories for bourgeoisie light entertainment magazines. In contrast, Brighton Rock is much more complex. It is classed as a modern classic, and therefore does not follow the simple lines of popular, mass produced fiction. Instead, its chapters are presented as from each of the character's points of view making the plot non-chronological, as some events happen simultaneously but at different pages of the book. For example, the death of Hale and Ida searching for him occur at the same time but at different stages of the book. This adds a more complex level to the narrative.
Brighton Rock is written nominally in the third person, as it still only follows each character's movements in turn but the Sherlock Holmes stories are always in the first person, as Dr. Watson, which gives the reader a definite sense of place in the story but has its limitations. For example, all events must take place while Dr. Watson is present, or they must be recounted to him by another character. In contrast, Greene can make the reader everywhere at once and it allows him to use the cinematic detail in his description that gives his locations the ...
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Brighton Rock is written nominally in the third person, as it still only follows each character's movements in turn but the Sherlock Holmes stories are always in the first person, as Dr. Watson, which gives the reader a definite sense of place in the story but has its limitations. For example, all events must take place while Dr. Watson is present, or they must be recounted to him by another character. In contrast, Greene can make the reader everywhere at once and it allows him to use the cinematic detail in his description that gives his locations the depth and quality that Conan Doyle's does not due to his use of the first person. This is because if Conan Doyle were to use such complex description and metaphor in his description as Dr. Watson or in the speech of another character, it would make them sound like they had verbal diarrhoea. Greene's talent, I feel, lies in his ability to use such gushing torrents of description and manage not to bore or alienate his reader, rather he involves them further in the scene. Conan Doyle, as I have said, achieves this in a different way, not through lengthening his description but by the simple act of using the first person to write his stories: he makes the reader Dr. Watson.
Another dimension to the description in Brighton Rock is that Greene is biased against more or less everything. The squalor of the Steyne in, 'The shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast.' Words such as 'shabby' and 'deformed' give the impression to the reader of poverty and mutation, the two going hand in hand. These are things, especially mutation, which society abhors. By using these adjectives, Greene tries to make the reader hate the place as well. Also, in that passage, 'deformed breast' is an interesting contrast of words. The breast is usually regarded as being an artistic, beautiful and motherly object of adoration, but by making it deformed, in the reader's eye Greene is defiling a beautiful object, making the impact greater. In The Man With the Twisted Lip Conan Doyle, by contrast, uses only simple atmospheric description and practical description (the naming of routes street by street, obviously made using a map of London, an unusual feature). An example of this simple description is found at 'I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with ice crystals.' In this quotation two things are explored: the fire and the window. The description is atmospheric because it uses the contrasting words 'frost' and 'warmed', one being cold, the other hot. The effect on the reader is that they immediately imagine the atmosphere of warmness inside but bitterly cold outside that we all know. The simple description has therefore set up an atmosphere; it is atmospheric.
In The Man With The Twisted Lip Conan Doyle does use one unusual device to add depth to his writing: a ruse in the plot at the very beginning to throw the reader off what the true plot is. That ruse is the disappearance of Isa Whitney. Conan Doyle does this to open the story in a mundane way, but surprise the reader with the eventual outcome: the disappearance of Neville St. Clair. Or perhaps Conan Doyle just got sick of the Whitney plot half way through writing. Who knows!? Other than this Conan Doyle sticks to the usual crime story plot: the missing/dead person or thing, the impossible clue, the amazing detective and the twist in the solving of it all. Greene does the same in his plot structure, although with much more focus on the characters in turn, especially on mentality of the criminal Pinkie. Greene tries almost to explain why Pinkie is so evil with the recounting of his scarred childhood (the 'weekly exercise'), resulting in his misogyny (?), Catholic godfearing and sadism. Also, Ida Arnold is the 'detective' in Brighton Rock, although she is not intelligent or brilliant, just a whore sentimental to Hale's memory as Greene portrays her. In fact, Greene grudgingly makes Ida the heroine and the force of good, even though the traditional good of Godliness is the real enemy in the book. Ida is a weird choice for a heroine. She personifies every human sin. She is a puritan's nightmare, as shown in, 'Death shocked her, life was more important. She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven and hell, only in ghosts...' and her ultimate anti-religious statement, 'to her death was the end of everything. At one with the One - it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.' In all, Greene's story is one of 'good' as the here and now, however demonic and hedonistic, triumphing over evil the eternal whereas Conan Doyle has no such moral depth to his story, just an impossible clue.
Brighton Rock is unusual in this way. Greene is writing a crime story, usually the realm of light entertainment (popular fiction) but here, he transforms the whole novel with the psychoanalysis of Pinkie and the subtext of religion, damnation and salvation. Greene sums this up in the phrase that Pinkie comforts himself with, 'between the stirrup and the ground he mercy sought and mercy found'. Through this quotation Greene explores the hypocrisy of religion and the way the all-forgiving belief enables people to sin and expect God to forgive. The psychosis of Pinkie is explored hand in hand with his love/hate relationship with the idea of Christianity, best shown in Pinkie's treatment of the doll; 'holding the Mother of God by the hair' and 'His fingers pulled absent mindedly at the doll's hair'. The simile of the Mother of God being held by the hair reveals Pinkie as the ultimate misogynist; the one woman, as a Catholic and a Christian, he should revere he is holding by the hair.
In both stories the authors use very derogatory language towards women. In The Man With the Twisted Lip Conan Doyle portrays women in the typical Victorian sense, the weak and feeble damsel in distress, shown in 'She ran forward, threw her arms around my wife's neck and sobbed upon her shoulder' and in Holmes wondering 'Might I not escort her to this place (the opium den)?' In Brighton Rock the book is anti-female throughout. Rose is at first a weak, feeble young girl (although that image changes later) and the enemy of piousness, Ida, is a sacrilegious figure throughout as a strong, fighting, questioning, irreverent, independent goodtime woman. In 1938 it could have been said, due to her liking of men, independence and 'bawdiness' that she could have been more like a prostitute than lady. All this does not seem to look good on Greene, who seems to have somewhat of a complex himself against women... Pinkie is based on himself, do I wonder?
In the Sherlock Holmes stories it is obvious they were written in Victorian England. Conan Doyle, with his character Homes' omniscience, is typical of the popular opinion at the time of scientists as being 'the new God' after Darwin's evolutionary theories were starting to gain acceptance amongst the masses. Even more obvious is the air of demi-God immortality Holmes exudes. This is typical of opinion when the British Empire was at its height when it seemed that Great Britain had more power over the world than God did, so Englishmen must be 'Gods'.
The characterisation in the two pieces is quite different as well. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie, the main character, has three sides to him, the vulnerable boy, as shown in 'he had a fair, smooth skin, the faintest down,' shows his physical boyishness 'a face of starved intensity' shows his thinness as vulnerability but with a dangerous mind in 'intensity'. The dangerous psychopath with a hate of love and affinity with pain is revealed in, 'a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty... he demanded some satisfaction different from theirs, habitual, brutish and short.' Greene uses a pun on prick by using 'pricked'. The psychosis is shown not in his nauseousness (that would show him to be prudish) but in his desire for cruelty to the lovers. The habitual, brutish and short pleasure could either be violence with his razor (due to his psychosis) or it could mean he wishes to relieve his sexual energies through rape. The third side of Pinkie is shown: the religious ascetic. This is shown by his unwillingness to drink, smoke or even eat chocolates throughout the book, as shown in, ''I don't eat chocolates' the boy said. 'Packet of Players?' 'I don't smoke.'' This is Greene's mark of Pinkie's Catholic piousness that is one aspect of the book that makes it markedly different from anything Conan Doyle wrote. Religion is one of those 'heavy' subjects that one always must avoid in small talk, so one would think it would be a subject to avoid in the realms of 'small' literature (the crime genre) but Greene accomplishes it. I think this is one of the things that makes Greene stand out as a great writer. A quotation that show Pinkie's piousness is, 'These atheists, they don't know nothing. Of course there's hell. Flames and damnation.' Greene may be showing his own sympathies for atheists here as Pinkie's statement that atheists are uneducated are put forward in a grammatically incorrect sentence, using a double negative ('don't know nothing') making instead Pinkie look the uneducated, stupid person. It is interesting also that Greene's Pinkie shows no acknowledgment of Heaven, almost as though Pinkie has already, at the age of 17, decided his fate and his destination after his life has ended. Eternal pessimism and cynicism is another sign of Pinkie's mental state.
In contrast, The Man With the Twisted Lip has little character depth and avoids all 'heavy' subjects. I have been unable to find one reference to religion in both The Man With the Twisted Lip and The Blue Carbuncle. Conan Doyle has skirted around love, death and all other 'heavy' subjects.
Holmes is shown to be an actor in 'He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering, loose-lipped senility.' Showing his ability to assume a disguise. He is shown to be sure of his own talents, in saying, 'I have excellent ears'. Holmes is also shown to be masterful, even domineering, in Watson's remark, 'Sherlock Holmes' requests... were always... put forward with such a quiet air of mastery.' Holmes is shown to be a happy man, through his 'bursting into a hearty fit of laughter.' Holmes is shown by Conan Doyle to be patronizing towards Watson in, 'Surely your medical experience would tell you, Watson...' this shows Holmes to be very confident and knowing of his own intellect and withering of those who do not share it. As you can see from these quotations, only the immediate superficial traits of Holmes' character, as viewed by another person, are explored by Conan Doyle. This may be due to the first person narrative but in any case it means there is no depth of time or mind to Holmes' character as there is in Pinkie's. In fact the exploration of Pinkie's character goes on infinitely through time; the eternity of hell is explored.
Personally, I much prefer Brighton Rock to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I prefer the depth of description, the character development, the characters overall and the general seediness and tenseness of Greene's Nobel prize nominated novel over the Victorian middle class serenity that exists throughout Conan Doyle's work. Overall, it seems as though Conan Doyle's work lacks 'teeth' and is not nearly as entertaining as the edginess and sordid detail of Greene's.
Adam Graham 4D
