Orient Express

It's never just 'an entertainment' when Graham Greene has written it. This novel about strangers on a train tries to cover a lot of ground about relationships and fate. His characters are very fleshed out, even if some of the plot is a little specious or a major character is simply an anti-semitic

Show More

stereotype. Carleton Myatt, a Jewish merchant, makes one think that Greene had not ever met a Jew. He is totally unrealistic and rather offensive, not out of particular venom (I think Greene tries to be sympathetic to Myatt) but out of a routine anti-semitism of the age.

Show Less

This is the first novel by Greene I've read and I've enjoyed it immensely - so much so that I'll be keeping an eye out for anything else by him I can lay hand on.

"Stamboul Train", set on the Orient Express around 1930, is stuffed with period atmosphere and a sense of a world, especially in Central

Show More

Europe and the Balkans, soon to be swept away by the rise of Nazism and by WWII. One of the themes which Greene examines in the novel is the profound anti-semitism experienced by Myatt, the Jewish merchant, including amongst the British passengers on the train. He is especially brought face to face with the visceral nature of hatred towards the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe by the attitude of a soldier just itching for an excuse to kill him. One cannot escape the feeling that Greene was truly prescient in his handling of this theme.

Running throughout the novel is the story of the Serbian communist agitator Richard Czinner who fled into exile some 5 years previously and is now on his way back to support a planned communist coup, only to find that it has broken out too early and hence failed. Greene explores Czinner's political idealism and the extent to which that ultimately leads him to personal disaster.

However his most memorable character is Mabel Warren, an aging, alcoholic, predatory, spiteful, butch dyke of a journalist who's prepared not only to sacrifice a man's life to get her story but to ensure that he is sent to his death for no other reason than the fact that he was a man.

Show Less

Probably not one of Greene's best, but still a cracking read, with the story framed neatly by the progress of the train to Constantinople.

The characters are memorable, even though they are stereotypes, we have a Jew, a Chorus Girl, a Girl On the Go (who hasn't got there yet), a Lesbian (complete

Show More

with cropped hair), a Small-Time Crook who has just murdered his first man).

An oddly satisfying read, the story is neatly wrapped up, and all the lives continue smoothly, heading into the infinite future, rather like all 30's fiction.

Show Less

Published in 1932, this spy thriller unfolds aboard the Orient Express as it crosses Europe from Ostend to Constantinople. Weaving a web of subterfuge, murder and politics along the way, it focuses upon the disturbing relationship between Myatt, the pragmatic Jew, and chorus girl, Coral Musker.

Pretty good book, not his best, but still a good adventure story through the Orient Express. One of his first novels so perhaps he was still stretching his wings.

Greene writes beautifully, structures artfully and delineates a landscape of people and place beautifully. It is difficult, however, to love the lazy cliches of the butch dyke and slightly sleazy Jew - of its time, but Greene knows better...

The various characters, with their different backgrounds and stories, really drew me in. Although the novel takes place almost entirely on a train, it never became dull at any point. I always wanted to keep reading.

Train travel is ideal for plot development as it allows for both public and private scenes which could not occur in a car, bus or airplane. Given the book's title, I had expected much more exotic events. The train travel is actually rather pedestrian with the notable events happening mostly off the

Show More

train Stamboul Train, the book that made Greene famous, already features his typical plot device in involving average persons into uncommon affairs and situations. The reader rides along with the protagonists on the fated conveyor belt, this time in the form of a train. Greene packs in a surprising amount of social commentary about then marginal groups (lesbians, Jews, socialists). A good if dated read.

Show Less

Published in 1932 this was Graham Greene's first major commercial success, and capitalised on the growing obsession with the glamour associated with continental rail travel that would later bring us Agatha Christie's "Murder On the Orient Express".

This is not Greene at his best - the novel is

Show More

rather disjointed, and the characters are rather too stereotypical for twenty-first century tastes. It remains, however, an enjoyable read, and offer an intriguing contrast with the more polished Greene that we encounter in the later novels.

Show Less

Meh. Not as good as The Quiet American. Good enough that I'll try another.

Short punchy action with some complexity. Socially modern for a 1932 publication.
Read dec 2005

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

_Orient Express_, also _Stomboul Train_. Greene's journey takes us through fidelity and duty in a racy political potboiler.

Hey! This is NOT "Murder on the Orient Express" (which was written by Agatha Christie.) But the publisher sure wanted to make you think it was. This book was initially published in 1933, titled "Stamboul Train." But a US publisher picked it up, retitled it, put lots of references to "murder" on the

Show More

cover, and probably sold a lot of copies.
Nevertheless, this is a very well-written book, although it is more of a study of characters and a discussion of how politics intersects with individuals' lives, than about murder (although there is an element of murder). In 1933, the inclusion of both Jewish and lesbian characters was probably considered quite radical, although to a modern reader, their portrayal will raise some eyebrows.
It's a very interesting book in that it doesn't offer even the hope of anything pure or ideal... but when things turn out the way they do, the reader still feels distraught, even though one can't logically argue that things would have been any better all around if coincidences had gone differently...

Show Less

{SPOILER ALERT} A Greene 'entertainment' set on the Orient Express, as some seemingly unrelated characters deal with issues of fidelity, anti-Semitism, and communism – Greene called it an 'entertainment' in order to differentiate it from his other more serious works, but 'Greeneland' could not be

Show More

what it is without some deeper thoughts. Central to the plot is the notion of fidelity to oneself or to others, whether in love (Musker and Myatt) or to a social class – Czinner and the people of Belgrade. The novel is a kind of mini-Passion play, as the central character gives his life on behalf of his people, but even this is tinged with pessimism as to its real purpose, as even he wonders whether the giving of his life will achieve anything. In fact, the whole plot seems to end in a series of nihilistic twists, with several characters' fates seemingly unresolved. An altogether depressing book, but told in Greene's inimitably angular prose.

Show Less

It wasn't just a railway journey with lots of twists and turns and mischief, it was a journey back into a time not that many years before I was born, a time my mother would have recognised, I felt like an onlooker, a fly on the wall, enjoying the view of life that my mother and grandfather talked

Show More

about occasionally. The sign of a really good book. :)

For my own information: written in 1932, later published in America as Orient Express and made into a film of the same name. Greene classed this novel as an 'entertainment'.

Show Less

Review first posted on BookLikes:


"I’m tired of being decent, of doing the right thing."

Stamboul Train is the story of a number of individuals who are thrown together within the confines of a train journey - a microcosm, in a way - and Greene offers us a peek into the relationships that develop

Show More

between the characters and the difficulty that each of the individuals has to adapt to the society they form.

It took a while to get into the story - just because every character has a story about how they came to embark on the journey on the Orient Express from Ostend to Istanbul.

At first, I thought this was going to be an easy read - because it is still an early one of Greene's entertainments - but it soon turned out that Stamboul Train seems to mark quite a turning point in Greene's writing:

Greene maintains his focus on the themes of individualism and social perception from a variety of angels which cannot be combined, and which - because of their incompatibility - now create a highly atmospheric state of disillusionment.

"Then the man spoke to her, and she was compelled to emerge from her hidden world and wear a pose of cheerfulness and courage."

More importantly to my reading enjoyment, though, Stamboul Train shows a consistent use of that refined prose which only shimmered through in The Man Within:

"He saw the express in which they had travelled breaking the dark sky like a rocket. They clung to it with every stratagem in their power, leaning this way and leaning that, altering the balance now in this direction, now in that. One had to be very alive, very flexible, very opportunist. The snow on the lips had all melted and its effect was passing. Before the spill had flickered to its end, his sight had dimmed, and the great shed with its cargo of sacks floated away from him into the darkness. He had no sense that he was within it; he thought that he was left behind, watching it disappear. His mind became confused, and soon he was falling through endless space, breathless, with a windy vacancy in head and chest, because he had been unable to retain his foothold on what was sometimes a ship and at other times a comet, the world itself, or only a fast train from Ostend to Istanbul."

Show Less