Brighton Rock

⚖The case for it

Pinkie Brown, teenage gang leader and Catholic, kills and is killed in Brighton's seedy underworld while a naive woman falls for him. Greene's most morally savage novel: can grace reach the genuinely evil? The crime elements are inseparable from his theological obsessions. A masterpiece of Catholic guilt and doomed youth.

— the canon

✕The case against

Greene rigs the scales. Ida Arnold, the only character who acts to save anyone, gets the narrator's contempt for her secular cheerfulness, while Pinkie's damnation is dressed in tragic dignity; kindness without theology counts for nothing here. Rose's devotion to a boy who openly despises her asks more credulity than the murders do. And the final line is pure cruelty to her.

— the honest librarian