Graham Greene (1904-1991) wrote many novels. I read a few of them in my twenties (The Quiet American, 1955 being my favourite), but the one that pops up most is Brighton Rock (1938), a novel set in the southern English beach town of Brighton, when Brighton was overrun with competing gangs, or mobs, as the Brits call them.
That same year Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) published La Nausée (1938), which took place in the fictive French port of Bouville (literally "Mud Town"), on the other side of the Channel from Brighton. La Nausée's protagonist is Antoin Roquenton, a world weary creature who, when not troubled by situations, is brought to the brink by inanimate objects. Brighton Rock's Fred Hale is also troubled. But his existential crisis is literal and told to us in the first sentence: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."
I am only fifty pages into Brighton Rock, but I can't help but wonder what impression, if any, Brighton Beach's Ida Arnold might have made on La Nausée's Roquenton. Ida only knew Hale for a few minutes, but her commitment to him -- his sudden disappearance and subsequent murder -- threatens to form the essence of Greene's novel.
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