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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A first-class journey through "Greeneland.", October 29, 2004
Originally published in 1933 as the Nazi Party was preparing to take power, Penguin Classics recently reissued a new, centenial edition of Graham Greene's classic novel of romance and betrayal, ORIENT EXPRESS, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. While the Orient Express rolls across Europe, from Ostend to Constantinople, Greene's entertaining novel follows the action inside the train. The cast of characters include Coral Musker, a beautiful showgirl; Dr. Czinner, a Communist political exile traveling ingognito; Mabel Warren, an alcoholic journalist; Josef Grunlich, a murderous burglar; and the controversial character (or perhaps more accurately, caricature), Carleton Myatt, a rich, Jewish businessman. While ORIENT EXPRESS probably does not rise to the standards set by some of Greene's other novels (e.g., THE END OF THE AFFAIR; TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT; THE POWER AND THE GLORY), it is nevertheless an entertaining minor novel. G. Merritt
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointment in a microcosmos, August 8, 2006
Of course far from his masterworks, this novel is still better than most which plague the bestsellers lists today. It is one of the first novels written by Greene, on of which he calls "entertainments", to distinguish them from his more serious novels. Nevertheless, here in an early work his recurrent subjects loom already: hope and regret; the moral loneliness of each individual; the inevitability of fate; the consciousness, or lack of it, of good and evil. A group of people are travelling from Ostende (Belgium) to Istanbul, each one with their fears or illusions. During the long way they meet and interact, love and forget each other. Carleton Myatt, a young Jewish merchant, is on his way to solve a problematic business situation with his employees in Turkey. During the trip he meets and seduces (through kindness and sacrifice) a young starlet of nightclubs who only dreams of love and welfare. Dr. Czinner (sinner?) a socialist revolutionary from Yugoslavia, is on the same train bound for Belgrade, but he is discovered and harassed by Mabel Warren, a British, alcoholic and lesbian journalist. The interaction between the characters creates an increasing tension which is only resolved, for good or evil, when each one of them meets his or her particular fate. Foremost is the heartbreaking story of the young dancer, who loses love in the middle of a snowstorm and political intrigue of which she understands nothing. In this book, Greene lets us see the great qualities that would later lead him to write his great novels.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, May 17, 2009
Although "Orient Express" (originally published as "Stamboul Train") anticipates the moral and social issues, as well as the concern with faith and faithfulness, apparent in Greene's later work, this early novel is more of a crowd-pleaser--intentionally so, since the author needed the money. But it's one of the greater of Greene's lesser novels; and not the least of his achievements is to take stock characters and immerse them in unusual situations. Most of the train's passengers are heading East for career opportunities--mercantile dealing, travel writing, theatrical performance, muckraking journalism, and even inciting a revolution. Safely aboard the train, however, they form temporary alliances and shrug off back-stabbing schemers, while the real worldly perils lie in wait off the train, in the towns and the countryside, in the station stops, where the passengers are threatened by thieves and killers, merciless soldiers and dark prisons, and inhabitants who can't speak their language. ("She was afraid at being left alone when the train was in a station," reflects one character moments before her inadvertent arrest by people she can't understand.) As is usual in Greene's fiction, each of the "good" characters faces a test that, in this novel, approaches martyrdom: Will Myatt risk life and limb to rescue Coral? Will Coral abandon Dr. Czinner in his hour of need? Other characters--the gruff reporter Mabel Warren, the conflicted frontier guard Ninitch, the beautiful socialite Janet Pardoe, the absurd writer Q. C. Savory--hobble through life without ever confronting their own morally ambivalent prejudices and desires. Only Josef Grunlich, the murdering burglar, seems to be beyond redemption. By the end of the trip, those temporary alliances are reformed and sealed anew. Each character of this morality play ends up at a terminus preordained by the choices made or the circumstances faced. Even the killer, "brooding on the injustice of it all," meets his comeuppance--although not in the manner traditional to a murder story. In many ways, the "injustice" that determines the fates of these disparate travelers anticipates the fatalism of the noir-like novels Greene published later in the decade, particularly "Brighton Rock" and the irrational evil of its anti-hero Pinkie.
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