I highly recommend this book to all children and their parents (I would also include Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles) as it treats the subject of the loss of a pet in a most sensitive manner. The drawings capture most beautifully the words of fun, misbehaviour, sadness and gaiety and should be a must Christmas gift. The Tisbury library has a copy but I would urge you to purchase your own copy read it and enjoy the wonderful drawings before you give to the child of your choice.
Margaret Anderson
There is a banality to evil that is most difficult to portray realistically in a book, film or play. Blood curdling, spooky, sadistic cruelty is far easier but there again we realize that it is not true to life. Yet the verso can make the reader sympathize, even identify, with the villain be he Bill Sykes or a Great Train Robber. The character of Pinkie in Brighton Rock is wholly believable and deeply disturbing, as he possesses a malevolence about him that chills as the reader becomes witness to a soul on route to self-destruction determined with petty-minded viciousness to infect those closest to him with the ‘poison that moved in his veins’ and which explodes in burst pustules of violence.
Pinkie’s world is petty, his ambitions limited and his reasoning faulty, yet on a Bank Holiday weekend in Brighton his sinister actions blot out the sun. In Greene’s words, ‘He was like a child with haemophilia; every contact drew blood.’ And the saddest contact he makes is with a young, innocent and plain girl, Rose, whom he marries in haste so that she will be unable to testify against him in a court of law. Pinkie knows that, ‘She was good, but he’d got her like you got God in the Eucharist – in the guts. God couldn’t escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation for, this being a Greene novel, both she and him are aware of ‘mortal sin’ especially after ’ he tricks her into a suicide pact. But he knows he must spend eternity with his demons, she knows, hell will be hers by choice for, having chosen Pinkie, her guardian angel ‘tempted her to virtue like a sin.’
The end is almost too painful to bear and is not going to be given away here apart from yielding to the temptation to quote both the opening and closing sentence of this moral tale.
“Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours”
…
“She walks rapidly away in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.
Do read between those lines.
David Childs
Tisbury Library is open:
Monday 2pm - 7.00 pm
Wednesday 10 am – 1 pm
Friday 10 am - 7 pm
Books can be taken out from here and be returned to at any other Wiltshire Library Branch.
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In collaboration with Tisbury Library, the Editors invite anyone who has enjoyed a recently published book to write a short piece about it. Contributions can be e mailed to focustisbury@waitrose.com or editor@nadderfocus.co.uk, or posted to or left at the Parish Office, Hinton Hall Tisbury to be there by the 15th of the month before publication.
Tisbury Library is open:
Monday & Friday 2 pm -5 pm & 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm
Wednesday 10 am – 1 pm
Books borrowed here can be returned at any other Wiltshire Library Branch