Orient Express: An Entertainment

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.

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.

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.

Boarding the Orient Express to Istanbul are the Jewish merchant Myatt; a busybody Lesbian yellow-journalist named Mabel Warren; a mysterious doctor who calls himself Richard John, but who is actually the Serbian socialist agitator Czinner; Mrs Warren's soon to be ex-protege Janet Pardoe; and a penniless chorus girl named Coral Musker. It all sounds like an Agatha Christie novel -- but Greene had different fish to fry. Just when the story seems to take on a Dame Christie neatness, it all comes unravelled at the little border town of Subotica. Musker, who had found in Myatt a potential sugar daddy, tries to invite the Doctor to a celebration, but is whisked away as an accomplice to Czinner. Myatt at first searches for Coral, but is drawn to Janet Pardoe's greater classiness. And Mabel Warren, who had left the train at Vienna, suddenly shows up in Subotica to claim Coral Musker for her own. There are a few other characters, such as Josef Grunlich the Austrian thief; but my favorite is the purser at Ostend who cries out to Coral Musker, "Remember me!" even as he begins to forget her features.We are not dealing with a deep work like Greene's later, more serious efforts. Instead of a Shakespearean tragedy, we have on our hands instead a tragicomedy like ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL or MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Dr Czinner is executed, and everybody else seems to change partners as if it were a game of Musical Chairs. Graham Greene says it all when he quotes George Santayana in STAMBOUL TRAIN's epigraph: "Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate and comic in its existence."

With the momentum of a hurtling steam engine, Greene brings together on board an Istanbul-bound train characters from all walks of life: business magnate, journalist, novelist, socialite, chorus girl, clergyman, revolutionary, and criminal. Exciting adventures befall this group, and each character emerges distinctly above his or her "type." At the same time, the reader is presented with an interesting look at a microcosm of Europe in the '30s, seen through the cynical and class-conscious eyes of Greene. With this work, Greene has not yet turned his attention to the weighty spiritual issues and moral crises that would shape the center of his later novels. Rather he permits the reader to observe the class conflicts and cultural tensions between the characters and draw his own conclusions regarding morality and duty. Greene has a wonderful way of succinctly capturing ideas and images and operating his story-line on many levels at once. My only criticism of the work is that it is rife with confusing shifts of point-of-view, an awkwardness Greene leaves behind in his later novels. Also wonderful are The Heart of the Matter, The Power and The Glory, and The Honorary Consul. For biting satire, try Our Man in Havana and then see the recent Boorman film The Tailor of Panama.