Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938, and later made into films, a 1947 film and a 2010 film. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. The title is a reference to a confectionery traditionally sold at seaside resorts, used as a metaphor for human character. The novel ties into Greene's earlier 'entertainment' A Gun for Sale, Raven's murder of mob boss Kite, mentioned in A Gun For Sale, allows Pinkie to take over his mob and thus sets the events of the novel in motion.
2012年才真正開始讀這本
今天 研究一下英國的海邊名勝地 Brighton 因為想讀七零年代末該讀而未讀的小說 Brighton Rock
我去過Brithon一次 不過小說第一頁的路線圖卻完全沒印象 所以多查一下 沒想到該城市變化甚大 Brighton Rock 一書所談的地理背景是兩次大戰之間的Brighton 現在改建很多
資料庫收有牛津文學英國和愛爾蘭
Oxford Guide to Literary Britain & Ireland:Brighton and Hove
讀到下句 我去查牛津美國英文辭典 發現 bolt·hole在英國就是兔子等用來逃脫的穴路或濄
我才知道BOLT還有其他意思 不只是螺絲等等
Alan Brownjohn's poem ‘A Brighton’ makes engaging use of the town's reputation as a secret bolthole for Londoners:
"‘Brighton’: not far, a lie or an excuse
Like dental checks or grandmothers' funerals.
‘Did you have a nice day at Brighton?’ asks the master
Receiving a boy's forged note about his cold.
昨晚臨睡前讀的.有些字眼只母語的人能用: tip, flutter
' I like a flutter myself, could you give me a tip, I wonder, for Brighton on Saturday?'
'Black Boy,' Hale said,'in the four o'clock.'
'He's twenty to one.'
Hale looked at her with respect. 'Take it or leave it.'
---Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
flutter
6 ((英俗))少額を賭(か)ける.
Brighton, Brighton Rock
2013.4.3 HBO
 Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Rowan Joffé |
|---|---|
| Produced by | Paul Webster |
| Screenplay by | Rowan Joffé |
| Based on | Brighton Rock by Graham Greene |
Brighton Rock is a 2010 British crime film loosely based on Graham Greene's 1938 novel of the same name. Rowan Joffé wrote the screenplay and directed the film, which stars Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Serkis, John Hurt, and Helen Mirren.
The novel was previously made into a film in 1947 by the Boulting brothers under the same title. Although the novel and original film are both set in the 1930s, the 21st century adaptation takes place in Brighton and is set during the Mods and Rockers era of the 1960s.[3][4]
In 1964, Pinkie Brown, a sociopathic member of a Brighton gang, murders a man who has himself killed the gang leader, Kite. He befriends Rose, a young waitress who witnessed the gang's activity, to keep an eye on her. She falls in love with him. To prevent her being compelled to give evidence against him, he marries her. Ida (Rose's employer and a friend of the man killed by Pinkie) takes it upon herself to save the girl from the monster she has married.
Rowan Joffé was originally uninterested in the project, which as first proposed was to be a remake of the film, but after re-reading the novel, Joffé "fell absolutely in love with the character of Rose" and convinced the studio to let him adapt the novel directly.[5] Joffe later explained why he did his own adaptation of the novel:[5]
The novel was worthy of a contemporary adaptation. In fact, it makes it almost more dutiful as a filmmaker if you love the novel, to bring it to life without the restriction of censorship. I mean, a lot of the Catholicism was cut out of the original film because they didn’t want to offend Catholics... there are aspects of the film where if critics were to be honest about, and few of them have been certainly in England, that the 1947 version is a rather tame adaptation and certainly fails to do justice to the character of Rose, because the original black and white was made in a period where we were culturally and politically very patronising to women.
*****
monsignor （ It. ）： (1) 蒙席：教宗頒賜有功神父的榮銜，通常可穿與主教近似之主教服裝。 (2) 主教：拉丁國家都用此稱呼。 Monsignor 縮寫方式甚多：英語通用者為 Msgr., Mgr. ，拉丁國家則用 Mons. 。法文稱作 monseigneur 。
MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE By Graham Greene.
September 19, 1982
An Amiable Graham Greene
By ROBERT TOWERS
MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE By Graham Greene. |
n recent years Graham Greene has been availing himself of the special prerogative of an old master. With many triumphs behind him, he can now turn his hand to whatever catches his fancy without feeling obliged to make a major statement or to advance his career in some striking way. The results of this freedom have ranged considerably in subject matter, tone and intensity. If none has been first-rate Greene, all have been interesting as latter-day reflections of the master's long-standing preoccupation with doom, pity and the inscrutability of God's will. In ''The Human Factor'' (1978) Greene once again stacked the deck against his protagonistvictim, a mediocre but kindly man trapped in a barbed-wire tangle of spying and betrayal. This novel was followed by ''Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party'' (1980), a chilling, even repellent story of a rich man who sadistically plays God with the poor toadies who strive to please him, tormenting and humiliating them for the sport of it. And now - again shifting course - Greene presents us with ''Monsignor Quixote,'' the gentlest and most amiable of his books since ''Travels with My Aunt.'' In this seriocomic offshoot of Cervantes's gigantic fable, we encounter once more that unstable compound of Catholic faith and Communist sympathy that has contributed its peculiar tension to so much of Greene's fiction. But what was once corrosive has become mellow, and the explosive potential of the mixture has been reduced to the benign effects of a robust nonvintage wine. Set in Spain at some point in the late 1960's (after the Second Vatican Council and the abolition of the Latin mass), this quasi novel recounts the adventures of a humble priest -one of God's holy innocents - who, in a characteristic confusion of fact and fiction, believes himself descended from the famous Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, Don Quixote.
What propels Father Quixote from his parish in El Toboso is his sudden and unexpected promotion to the rank of Monsignor. This has come about through the intervention of a powerful Italian bishop who, when stranded by the breakdown of his Mercedes in El Toboso, had been much impressed by the old priest's ability not only to provide him with an excellent lunch (quantities of liquor and a horsemeat steak) but also to fix his car (which had simply run out of gas). When the letter of promotion arrives from the Vatican, Father Quixote's local bishop is both incredulous and outraged, for he has long since dismissed the priest as a bumbling old fool. He grants Father Quixote a leave of absence (as a preliminary to getting rid of him altogether) and sends an up-to-date and officious young priest, Father Herrera, to take charge of the parish. Father Quixote teams up with the Communist ex-mayor of El Toboso, whom he dubs Sancho Panza, and together they set off across Spain for Madrid to buy the purple socks and bib that are the insignia of the new monsignor's rank.
Their conveyance is an ancient, decrepit Fiat, which the priest calls Rocinante (after his ancestor's steed) and treats as though it were a living creature. Well supplied with cases of the local wine, with cheese and sausage, with volumes of St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa (which correspond to Don Quixote's old books of chivalry), a work by Father Heribert Jone on moral theology and a copy of ''The Communist Manifesto,'' their journey is both bibulous and loquacious.
''They drove very slowly, looking out for a tree that would give them shade, for the late sun was slanting low across the fields, driving the shadows into patches far too thin for two men to sit in them at ease. Finally, under the ruined wall of an outhouse which belonged to an abandoned farm, they found what they needed. Someone had painted a hammer and sickle crudely in red upon the crumbling stone.
'' 'I would have preferred a cross,' Father Quixote said, 'to eat under.' '' 'What does it matter? The taste of the cheese will not be affected by cross or hammer. Besides is there much difference between the two? They are both protests against injustice?'
'' 'But the results were a little different. One created tyranny, the other charity.' '' 'Tyranny? Charity? What about the Inquisition and our great patriot Torquemada?' '' 'Fewer suffered from Torquemada than from Stalin.' '' 'Are you quite sure of that -relative to the population of Russia in Stalin's day and of Spain in Torquemada's?' '' 'I am no statistician, Sancho. Open a bottle - if you have a corkscrew.' '' 'I am never without one. But you have the knives. Skin me a sausage, Father.' '' And so the conversation goes - relaxed, bantering, more than a little obvious. They argue about the Trinity, and Father Quixote tries to explain it, using the recently emptied bottles as illustration - only to fall into heresy when he allocates two fullsized bottles to the Father and Son and a half-bottle to the Holy Ghost.
A NUMBER of the adventures shared by the monsignor and the mayor are modern parallels to episodes in the original ''Don Quixote.'' When, for instance, the two men run afoul of the Guardia Civil, the mayor compares the state police to the windmills with whom the knight tilted; after all, the police ''revolve with every wind,'' gladly serving whoever is in power, whether it be Generalissimo Franco or the present government or even the Communists, should they ever win control. Similarly, when Father Quixote impulsively allows an armed robber to escape the Guardia, the reader is explicitly referred to the Don's freeing of the galley slaves. No doubt there are other parallels that scholars of the great original will detect; most of the adventures, however, are clearly Greene's invention and meant to serve his own thematic purposes, which are connected in only the loosest fashion to those of Cervantes.
Inevitably, the escapades of the pair get Father Quixote in trouble with his bishop, a worldly prelate sympathetic to the conservative Opus Dei movement within the Spanish church. The bishop and Father Herrera are scandalized by the priest's association with a known Communist and by the reports that have reached them, which include not only Father Quixote's run-ins with the Guardia Civil but also his presence at a brothel (which he assumed to be an exceptionally friendly hotel) and at a pornographic movie (to which he went in all innocence, attracted by its holy title, ''A Maiden's Prayer''). On the grounds that Father Quixote has gone mad, they arrange for him to be abducted while he is sleeping off his wine, given an injection and brought back to his house in El Toboso, where he is kept locked in his own room. ''So I am a prisoner, he thought, like Cervantes.'' The priest's escape, with the aid of his devoted housekeeper and the mayor, and his further adventures, both droll and poignant, constitute Part Two of ''Monsignor Quixote''; I will not divulge the ending except to say that it involves the performance of a hallucinatory mass that I found wonderfully moving and eerie.
THE rejection of dogmatic authority - whether of the church, the party or the state - is the presiding theme of the book, a theme that in one way or another is embodied in nearly every episode of ''Monsignor Quixote.'' As his writings, both autobiographical and fictional, testify, Greene's attitude toward authority has always been problematic. A convert to Catholicism who has been strongly attracted by Marxism, Greene has aligned himself with two systems that have traditionally required a high degree of obedience and submission from their adherents; yet, having snuggled close to authority, he has always drawn back, insisting upon his heterodoxy.In his openly Catholic novels he has at times skirted heresy - indeed, his fellow convert, Evelyn Waugh, accused him of it for the apparent sanctioning of Scobie's suicide at the end of ''The Heart of the Matter.'' In ''Monsignor Quixote'' it is always the spirit rather than the letter (of either system) that Greene extols, the impulse of love rather than the fine discriminations of dogma and moral theology; his sympathies lie with human weakness rather than rectitude. When Father Quixote tells Sancho that he has never been troubled by sexual desires, Sancho replies (rather surprisingly) that Father Quixote is a very lucky man. ''Am I? he questioned himself. Or am I the most unfortunate? ... How can I pray to resist evil when I am not even tempted? ... He prayed in his silence: O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference.''
Doubt becomes, paradoxically, the saving grace. Early in the book, both the monsignor and the mayor, after drinking a great deal, admit doubts concerning the absolute authority of their respective faiths. Father Quixote is especially troubled by the doctrine of Hell and eternal damnation.
'' 'I try not to doubt,' the Mayor said. '' 'Oh, so do I. So do I. In that we are certainly alike.' ''The Mayor put his hand for the moment on Father Quixote's shoulder, and Father Quixote could feel the electricity of affection in the touch. It's odd, he thought, as he steered Rocinante with undue caution round a curve, how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.''
SHORTLY afterward Father Quixote is oppressed by a nightmare in which Christ is saved from the Cross by a legion of angels and the whole world knows with certainty that He is the Son of God. ''There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all.'' The dream chills Father Quixote with despair. ''God save me from such a belief,'' he whispers to himself.
If I have dwelt on the thematic rather than the formal aspects of ''Monsignor Quixote,'' it is because the book is not so much a novel as a whimsical meditation on faith and doubt and the varieties of human folly - a meditation with plenty of illustrations. As such it is often charming, bemusing rather than provocative, leisurely rather than energetic, at times even a bit slack. More than any work of Greene's that I have read, it is suffused with nostalgia for the pre-industrial, pre-bourgeois world, a world of face-to-face encounters between man and God, man and man, man and beast (Rocinante is, after all, more beast than car). Greene celebrates a world of simple appetites that can be directly satisfied when two contentious friends sit down to cheese, sausage, wine and talk. ''Monsignor Quixote'' mildly invites - rather than compels -the reader to share this humble feast.
Robert Towers, who teaches at Queens College, is the author of ''The Necklace of Kali'' and ''The Monkey Watcher.'' His new novel, ''The Summoning,'' will be published next spring.
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