Pinkie Brown

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Pinkie Brown is a fictional character, the antihero of Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock. He was portrayed by Richard Attenborough in the 1947 film adaptation.

[edit] Plot and character

In the novel, Brown is portrayed as an up-and-coming gangster, the teenaged leader and enforcer of a powerful gang in the Brighton underworld. A violent sociopath, he finds sadistic pleasure in brutalizing and murdering people, even his own henchmen. In the beginning of the novel, he kills Fred Hale, a member of the gang he considers disloyal; that crime sets the rest of the story in motion.

Brown is not only a sociopath, but also an incurable neurotic. He abhors sex (as a child, he spied on his parents making love, and was both aroused and disgusted by it), is obsessed with the idea of sin to the point that he believes himself to be pure evil and beyond redemption, and loathes women as the embodiment of weakness. Especially his idea of sin is deeply shaped Roman Catholic upbringing, though he never goes to church. He is not without normal desires, however; he wonders what it would feel like to love someone, even as he thinks himself incapable of it, and his phobia of sex does not prevent him from being as preoccupied with losing his virginity as any other teenaged boy.

The two main conflicts Brown is faced with throughout the course of the novel come from the two other main characters: Ida Arnold, a local busybody who wants to bring him to justice because it's "the right thing to do," and Rose, a young waitress who falls in love with him. The former is morally upright, with a deep empathy for people in trouble; she is Brown's total opposite and, strangely, the novel's antagonist. Rose is far more troubling for Pinkie, as he sees in her the chance to experience a normal life, even though he does not really love her and looks down on her as his inferior. To him, she is not a person, but a symbol of "pure good" forming an alliance with his "pure evil." He is so taken with her that he unwisely brags about murdering his henchman to impress her.

Brown eventually contracts a civil marriage with Rose, mostly to make sure she doesn't go to the police. It is a dysfunctional union from the start: he degrades and abuses her, can find no common ground to relate to her on. Arnold aggravates the situation by continuously appealing to Rose to leave the marriage. Rose refuses, even though she knows deep down that her husband is a monster; a devout Catholic, she sees the fact that she is living in "mortal sin" with him (they are not married in church and are thus, technically, living in fornication) as her expression of her deep love and devotion to him who is "evil". Indeed, she fantasizes about going to hell with him.

Through dogged, self-righteous persistence, Arnold infiltrates Brown's gang and unravels it, bringing the police down upon him. Cornered, Brown inadvertently splashes acid in his own face while attacking Arnold, subsequently falling to his death in his pain and confusion.