ordered this from the library so's I can read it for the Greene group thingie, but have read it back in the 60s (as a teenager). Wonder if my star count will go down (it can't go up)?
...finished this on Saturday and went straight out to watch the film. Won't file my review until what is it - Feb 20th, but just to say
a) my star count has not gone down
b) the new film is worth watching but seek out the original, it's better. Rose is very good in the new film however...

..Feb 20th - had to go out for a family thing, and it's getting on now, so will shape up my notes and post here now (haven't read anyone else's yet):

This novel has settled deeply within me, I realise, from the first time I read it in 1969. Stories I have written have themes that probably came from that reading so far back: my story ‘Background Noise’ has a girl getting caught up with a gang and realising she is out of her depth; another has a young group of criminals living together in a house, monitored by an older set. I reckon Greene must have set me on this path.

Possibly, if I'd read it for the first time now I'd baulk a bit at how some of the minor characters are slightly caricatured (eg Colleoni), possibly the plot is melodramatic, but this is a totally absorbing read. Greene is a master of prose that is tight and wraps round you, detailed, full of naunce. The characters (Ida, Pinkie and Rose in particular) become people you’ve met and know. The dialogue is realistic but serves the novel’s purpose…

The greatest moments in the book for me lie in the detail of the everyday, Greene has a good grasp of popular culture, the photograph booths, the music and dancing, the teashops and holidaymakers, and of course the recording booths. The passage, the pages that made me love this book and Greene were the ones after Pinkie is razored on the racecourse, runs and finds refuge in a garage:

The garage had never been used for a garage; it had become a kind of potting shed. Little green shoots crept, like caterpillars, out of shallow boxes of earth: a spade, a rusty lawn mower.. an old rocking horse, a pram which had been converted into a wheelbarrow, a pile of ancient records.. they lay with trowels, what was left of crazy paving, a doll with one glass eye and a dress soiled with mould.

[which leads to Pinkie, bleeding on its floor wondering about the owner of this garage]

this, the small villa under the racecourse, was the best finish he could manage.. like the untidy tidemark on a beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go farther.

He sidled out of the garage. The new raw street cut in the chalk was empty except for a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty. He limped by them, his cut hand closed on his razor, with his cruel virginity which demanded some satisfaction different from theirs, habitual, brutish and short.

He knew where he was going. He wasn't going to return to Frank's like this with the cobwebs from the garage on his clothes, defeat cut in his face and hand. They were dancing in the open air on the white stone deck above the Aquarium, and he got down on to the beach where he was more alone, the dry seaweed left by last winter's gales cracking under his shoes. he could hear the music - 'The One I Love'. Wrap it up in cellophane, he thought, put it in silver paper.

How accurately Greene can portray - through simple detail like the plants in the garage, the dancers above the waves - Pinkie consumed with anger and disdain for those who don't feel the perpetual pain and absurdity of life, like Ida (life's good if you don't weaken, it's all a bit of fun); his teenage contempt for the adult life and its daft comforts; but also his loneliness and bitterness and acceptance of the inevitable, the fact that humans are the fallen, the last cry of innocence is given at birth (a remembered quote).

Greene has a bit of fun with new age religion at the crematorium (we don’t believe in medieval hell…), but he is serious about the loss of innocence. Pinkie's telephone number is 666. Him and Rose are the realistic ones, knowing they are damned, accepting it. It might break your heart to see Rose submit to the pain that Pinkie inflicts, but she sees no problem in it, pain is the natural state of being on earth. They are both Catholics, they ‘complete each other’ (Pinkie has this feeling about her even though he is constantly running her down and telling his gang he will kill her etc..) They both come from grinding poverty. They wear cheap clothes, have a limited vision, both are outsiders (Rose never been to a dance, the scene where she is the victim of the other waitresses' sniggers). The most telling scene for me is the meeting of Pinkie and her parents where he ‘buys’ her from them, for £15 (I think, it’s a £150 in the 60s set film). They know hell already.. Pinkie’s message on the record will maybe devastate her, maybe not.

So so glad I re-read this book, utterly mesmersing.

In the recent film I missed the horseracing, the Kolley Kibber plot, and although it wasn't a bad attempt, the mods and rockers scenes were lovingly done, the block of flats where Rose lives would have been brand new (or fairly) and not have the 20-year-neglect look it has in the film. Pinkie I though didn't have the complexity given him by Greene, three expressions, but, as I said, Rose was spot on. Ida wasn't bad, Mirren was as good as she normally is, but it wasn't the Ida I pictured.