Acquired on a 3-for-2 offer at Waterstones yesterday.

Greene has been one of my big discoveries so far this year, at least on the basis of a copy of "Stamboul Train" picked up cheap in a charity shop a few months ago, and I've been planning to read more of his work as a result.

This is the third of Greene's novels I've read and the second in which Catholicism is a major factor in what happens - or at least in what drives some of the central characters.

Pinkie may be, as Coetzee's introduction emphasises, an individual of depravity and evil, but I question how effectively he is able to muster and exploit those "talents" (if we may call them such). He is in effect his own worst enemy and inadvertently destroys his gang - either by removing them or by alienating them by his extreme behaviour and uncompromising unreasonableness. No matter how "evil" he may be, there's only so much one individual can do compared to what might be achieved by a more sophisticated and mature leader with the backing of a gang behind him. Pinkie's evil, therefore, is self-limiting and it is clear that even without the denouement he is finished as gang leader. You cannot lead a gang you do not have and you cannot achieve much without one.

Additionally we watch both as the 17 year old Pinkie disintegrates under the pressure of picking up the mantle of his much older and experienced mentor and as his teenage arrogance and social and "professional" envy lead him into making the errors of judgement which lead him to where they do.

Both Pinkie and Rose are irretrievably damaged by the poverty and squalor of their childhoods - he turned sadistic and with an emotional repetoire which runs from anger to hate and back again, and she desperate enough to cling to the first male who shows her any interest or attention.

What is perhaps most frightening, and indeed relevant to today, about this novel is that we can so easily imagine unknown numbers of Pinkies and Roses being bred amongst the inner city underclass of run-down housing estates. The slums and conditions which bred these two are still there, though their outward form has changed to some extent. What happens when this underclass breaks free, with nothing to lose?

At the end of the novel, when Rose slinks back to their briefly shared marital home with the intention of playing the recording Pinkie made for her on their wedding day, "the worst horror of all" as Greene puts it, we know what she will be faced with - the fruits of a harvest of her own making. We can imagine it and her reaction, but do we feel any pity or sympathy for her? I honestly don't know.

RELEASE NOTES:

Left on a bench outside the cafe on Level 2.

just started it...

CAUGHT IN LONDON ENGLAND

just hit my to read list

RELEASE NOTES:
Interesting read with a strong moral plot, could be relative in todays inner city housing estates.