* Graham Greene's 'Brighton Rock' - knowing 'correctly' who someone is. 'You are Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.' Knowing who someone is. Surely this is one of the strong themes throughout Greene's Brighton Rock? If you do not know someone correctly, often you don't get what you want. You don't 'win the prize'.
A woman enters a Kemp Town bookie's shop, and the bookie calls out: "Here's Ida. Sit down Mrs Turner." She negotiates the odds and places her bet. Will the bookie win or will she? Ida leaves the shop. "And my name's not Turner." she says. "It's Arnold." And the bookie has lost what he wants. Pinkie himself sometimes 'gets people right', and often he doesn't. He tries to intimidate service staff, a former school acquaintance whom he'd bullied gets called 'a servant', yet the 'waiter' is no servant at all, ignores the working-class bluster and, worse, dear Pinkie does not get what he wants. Pinkie does not correctly 'know' his dodgy lawyer, for if he did he would have known that the man could not get on the channel ferry and flee to France - and is this inability to 'get it right' why Pinkie ultimately fails and dies?
It is one of the profound human conceits surely, and perhaps Greene knew it. People not accurately grasping who 'the other' is. And the best way this book could have ended, the most tragic 'not knowing someone, correctly' of them all, is of course little Rose running off at the end to salvage the words Pinkie had transferred to vinyl for her. As Graham Greene puts it: 'She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.'
You need to get it right - You are Mr. Kolley Kibber; I claim the Daily Messenger prize.
* Of course you could read Brighton Rock just for its occasional quip: 'There aren't any good funerals these days. Not with plumes.'
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