The city of Brighton has been the subject of fiction from Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, through to Robert Rankin’s Brightonomicon, with many others in between. Going back even further, the town features in Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray and even Dr Johnson visited and worked in the town.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the place. I visit frequently, as our daughter lives in the “joined at the hip” town of Hove, and on a sunny day its pleasant enough, but that scruffy, rather disreputable ” other” Brighton always lurks just beneath the surface, a place that’s “not quite safe”, where there’s always a possibility you’ll get your wallet pinched.
Now Robert Dickinson has written in The Noise of Strangers about the Brighton of our nightmares, where social order has disintegrated and the comfortable classes have retreated into gated communities, leaving the streets to the lawless Scoomers. The city has retreated within itself and travel beyond its boundaries is unusual, the only escape seeming to be run away to France, where you stand a good chance of ending up in an internment camp.
The city council has become a threatening totalitarian organisation, where the descendants of the Conservative and Labour parties battle for power, with senior councillors acting as local barons with all the trappings of power. An overbearing bureaucracy governs the town, with the major departments of Audit, Parks and Transport wielding threatening levels of power. The misnamed “Welfare” seems to be able to force children into nurseries where they are drilled in submission to the council and its teachings. The only discernible religion is the “Helmstone Mission” which seems to have shades of fervent evangelicalism, but mixed with sinister attitudes redolent of cultish brain-washing. Brighton is not a nice place to live! Continue reading Review: The Noise of Strangers – Robert Dickinson
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