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The Orient Express

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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

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.

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.

Orient Express is a time capsule. It was written in the early 1930s and, as such, captures the world of the inter-war period in continental Europe. The book's strengths and weaknesses spring from this perspective. The strength are that Greene shows us a world that was rather bleak and yet vibrant. The downside is that anti-Semitism and class-based prejudices are evident both in the character's and in Greene's attitudes. However, as a time capsule of a lost era, this book is worth reading.

I have enjoyed a number of Greene's novels, but was disappointed with Orient Express. For a better read and more compelling characters, I recommend Greene's later work including The Quite American, The Comedians or even The Heart of the Matter.

Graham Greene the eminent British novelist published this minor, suspensful and entertaining work in 1932. In Great Britain the novel is entitled "Stamboul Train". The novel is short but has a murder and interesting characters to keep your attention. The characters are well sketched and the novel has deeper depth than the typical spy thriller.

Among the players are:

Coral Musker-a beautiful but poor chorus girl traveling from England to appear in a musical in Istanbul. She falls in love on the train and becomes involved in the pursuit of a Yugolslavian Communist leader Dr.

Czinner. Coral is the most human andsympathetic character in the whole business. She is touching, pathetic and deserving of a better fate than the one she receives.

Carelton Myatt is a young businessman from London. He is on the way to Turkey to cement a business deal. He is also a womanizer who initiates Coral into sex. Later he sets his cap for Janet Pardoe a half-Jewish niece of Mr. Steiner a wealthy businessman. Myatt is a despicable character who seeks his own ego satisfactions not trifling with such things as true love. As the novel ends his future looks bright but we the readers do not like him. Greene chose to make him Jewish opening himself up for charges of Antisemetic caricatures. Much of British society in the 1930s was adverse to persons of the Jewish faith. The novel was written shortly before Hitler became German Chancellor. It should be stated that Greene served bravely in World War II as a spy for the British Government. I do not think he was overtly antisemetic.

Mabel Warren is a lesbian and obnoxious journalist who is eager to interview Czinner and Savery who is a popular novelist. She travels with Janet Pardoe but when dumped sets her sights on Coral.

Josef Grunlich is a robber and murderer who flees Vienna escaping to Constantinople. Grunlich is a despicable human being.

Greene manages to interwine the lives of all these people into an exciting narrative. This is a minor work but is written in the author's cool style with colorful use of metaphor and a good use of mirror imagery. Penguin has reissued this novel in a beautiful edition for the Greene 100th year birthday celebration which was held in 2004. Christopher Hitchns the acerbic critic has a fine introduction to the novel included in the Penguin edition. This book is a good introduction to Graham Greene one of our greatest modern novelist.

ORIENT EXPRESS differentiates from other Graham Greene's works, which are normally considered literary fiction of a serious writer, in its entertaining nature. It reads like an adventurous story whose every little detail exuded demands one's undivided attention in order to piece it all together. As the Orient Express hurtles across Europe on its three-day journey from Ostend to Constantinople, the driven lives of several of its passengers become bound together in a fateful interlock. The curious skein of characters include a beautiful chorus girl enroute to a performance, a rich Jewish businessman bound for a business deal, a mysterious, sinister-looking but kind doctor returning to his native Belgrade after being fugitive for five years, a cunning murderous burglar who had fled a crime, and a spiteful journalist who contrived to make the headline story.

Given the nature of these various characters and a backdrop that constitutes to a curious sense of suspension in a confined, onrushing train, ORIENT EXPRESS, though a less literary work, does not fail to combine the exotic and the romantic with the sordid and the banal. These passengers, who have little or nothing in common with one another that they will probably never overlap have they not been assigned in the same car, retain their own life drama, conditions and secrets under the changing skies. The meanness of everyday existence is found at the bottom of every suitcase, and has in fact been packed along with everything else.

It doesn't seem obvious at first that ORIENT EXPRESS bespeaks self-sacrifice and betrayal. It is the usual case when people are far from home and routine that they will stair to make an unwonted exertion of the spirit or the will. The book, though its contrariety of style to Greene's other works, turns out to be a useful if not fortunate failure in containing the themes of self-sacrifice and betrayal. It is almost unexpected that the train, the passengers, and the direction to which the train steered symbolize a time period and the revolution.

No, this is not the Agatha Christie mystery :). It's an absorbing semi-political thriller by Graham Greene, with great characters and a compelling plot. Read it!

The story of a bunch of people taking the Orient Express to Istanbul. One of them is a rich Jew and he has an affair with a poor dancer on the train, and almost falls in love with her.

Greene writes well enough to carry you along, but I was let down by the blah way in which the story ended. It felt like going along with someone who promises to take you to an interesting bar, only to discover that the bar is smelly and full of old drunks. Perhaps that is a requirement of making a story 'realistic' and thus literary, as opposed to a schmaltzy, feel-good Hollywood finish... but the the ending, in which the Jew goes for the beautiful, empty, vacuous girl and forgets all about the little dancer with nothing more than a slight shrug made me want to shrug off this story as well.

I find Graham Greene to be almost unreadable. I know that this is going to be considered near blasphemous, since literary critics have heaped such praise upon him and so many reviewers here have done likewise.

However, in a word, I find him depressing. His characters suffer from interminable analysis of their every thought and action. The larger story is merely a vehicle for these internal monologues that, frankly, I don't find particularly insightful or interesting. It was V. S. Pritchett who first remarked about Greene's 'perverse and morbid tendencies'. While Greene is no doubt highly intelligent and capable of a very high level of writing, the end result, for me, is something very unpleasant.

I first read 'The Heart Of The Matter'. God, what an endlessly depressing scene! Nor was there any particular character I could sympathize with or even care about. In spite of my negative reaction to this highly praised work, I thought I would give him another try with 'Orient Express' (a.k.a., 'Stamboul Train'), thinking that in this 'entertainment' as Greene called it I would actually be, well, entertained. Instead, I get a trainload of depressing characters whose every thought is scrutinized to an excruciating degree.

Example (from Myatt's suspicions about his business dealings):

'It was odd. He had chosen the samples with particular care. It was natural of course that even Stein's currants should not all be inferior, but when so much was suspected, a further suspicion was easy. Suppose, for example, Mr. Eckman had been doing a little trade on his own account, had allowed Stein some of the firm's consignment of currants, in order temporarily to raise the quality, had, on the grounds of that improved quality, indeed, induced Moults' to bid for the business. Mr. Eckman must be having uneasy moments now, turning up the time-table, looking at his watch, thinking that half Myatt's journey was over. Tomorrow, he thought, I will send a telegram and put Joyce in charge; Mr. Eckman shall have a month's holiday. Joyce will keep an eye on the books, and he pictured the scurrying to and fro, as in an ants' nest agitated by a man's foot, a telephone call from Eckman to Stein or from Stein to Eckman, a taxi ordered here and dismissed there, a lunch for once without wine, and then the steep office steps and at the top of them the faithful rather stupid Joyce keeping his eye upon the books. And all the time, at the modern flat, Mrs. Eckman would sit on her steel sofa knitting baby clothes for the Anglican mission, and the great dingy Bible, Mr. Eckman's first deception, would gather dust on its unturned leaf.'

Lord have mercy. This stuff is like fingernails on a chalkboard!

William Golding called Green 'the ultimate twentieth-century chronicler of consciousness and anxiety'. This does not, however, make for entertaining reading. Greene's writing is an examination of the human condition totally devoid of lightness, humor (at least as I understand the word) or romance. His characters are an unpleasant, unhappy bunch.

Ultimately all his writing reveals is the real Graham Greene.