I much prefer “Stamboul Train” the original UK title. I picked this short book up out of curiosity mainly. I count The Quiet American as one of the best books I have read ever and I have a real soft spot for Greene as a result.

The back of the Bantam paperback I read (as well as its risqué cover) would have had me believe that this was a spy novel along the lines of Ian Fleming. But it wasn’t that at all, although there was some sex and intrigue. But it also had characters pondering morals and their place in the world, which is more of what I have come to expect from Greene.

The story is about a disparate group of people traveling on the Orient Express, which in the book runs from Paris to Istanbul with major stops in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Serbia. As the train winds its way on the three day and night journey, disparate train passengers get mixed up in each other’s lives. In particular, there is a young Jewish businessman and a chorus girl both traveling to Turkey for professional reasons who meet up when the girl falls ill and a former doctor traveling on a British passport who clearly is not English. In Germany, they pick up a beautiful woman and her journalist companion who recognizes the doctor’s true identity.

There was so much anti-Semitism present in this book, which was first published in 1933. This is not only shown overtly by the author in making the more boorish characters clearly prejudiced and small minded but also inadvertently with Greene adhering to what he probably felt were “positive” yet stereotypical portrayals. This kind of attitude isn’t totally unfamiliar to me because I read a fair amount of older books but YIKES it bugged me. Interestingly enough there is also a clearly lesbian character who receives kinder (though still often stereotypical) treatment.

Not GG's best outing but very entertaining all the same. His fourth novel. I really liked the Mabel Warren character, she reminded me of Beryl Reid in 'The Killing of Sister George', I do love it when older posh people swear, so elegant.

Was confused about Myatt, the Jewish currant seller who is subject to anti-semitism. He's a knight in shining armour, a spoiler of maidens and happy to marry for money and convenience. His recollections of Spaniards Road were bizarre, drunken girls offering themselves to men in carriages for gin and cigarettes. I live not far from there, it's bit more genteel these days, posh women in their Chelsea tractors who swear at cyclists, very elegant.

With themes of sacrifice and betrayal Greene's Stamboul Train/Orient Express/Stamboul Express is able to provide a moving bio-dome of the human experience on this train headed to Constantinople. There is a definite reason trains are so often used in literature and film. The sealed quality, the movement, the modernity gives the writer room to experiment with characters and themes in a way that others settings would make difficult.

This isn't a major Greene novel. Greene definitely wrote better as he matured. But, for those who love Graham Greene's approach to literature and story-telling, this book is a must. Greene's characters are amazing in their capacity for love, sacfrice, betrayal and tragedy. That is what makes Greene's novels so compelling and his characters so believable.

When initially picking up this book, I thought it was some sort of attribution to Agatha Christie's murder on the Orient express, however, I came to realize that Graham Green's Stambaul Express was renamed the Orient Express when it was published in the US. Anyway, in terms of the story line, I was thoroughly disappointed with the characters in this book as they consisted of power-hungry men, sexual assaulters, ditsy women, crazed lesbians, and an anti-Semitic description on Jews traveling Europe in the early 1900s. this book is also another prime example of a man writing about and describing women in a degrading and body-oriented way- not my fav. I think that words like "figure", "breast", and "slim" we’re used on practically every page when describing a female character. While this book is a time period piece and I understand that the views expressed were not necessarily an issue in 1933, the same ideas have not crossed over gracefully into the modern era. However, for all the negative I just spewed about this book- I did rather enjoy the suspense, the transition of storylines between characters and POV( i think it was clean and tied together very nicely) and i enjoyed the language when describing the plot. dialogue was rather lengthy and hard-to-follow but overall i did enjoy the story itself.

Greene’s first three published novels were failures. He was desperate for this one to succeed.

Greene later labeled it one of his “entertainments” but, as Christopher Hitchens says in his Introduction, it doesn’t fit with the other books Greene classifies thus.

It’s certainly not an entertainment in the style of Murder on the Orient Express

His main weakness in this book, as others have observed, is that, unlike most of his best books, he’s inclined to stereotypes, but agree with Hitchens that the author expresses no anti-Semitism, though some characters are outed for it.

His cast of characters are as follows.

Coral Musker, a sickly chorus girl

Carleton Myatt, a rich Jewish businessman

A lesbian journalist Mabel Warren traveling with her partner Janet Pardoe

Josef Grunlich, a cunning, murderous burglar.

Dr. Richard Czinner, an escaped communist leader and a mysterious school teacher, traveling on a forged British passport to his native Belgrade.

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Carleton Myatt was my favorite character. He’s extremely kind, with no hint of ingratiation. Most of the others have a bit of a nasty streak.

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"Everything is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate and comic in its existence"

(epigraph of George Santayana added by Greene to convey Greene's sense of ambivalence about people)

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The book is beautifully written and astutely observant of detail. I felt as if I were a passenger on the train for the entire book.

No one write likes this any more…..

“Richard John, with his mackintosh turned up above his ears, leant from the corridor window and saw the sheds begin to move backwards towards the slow wash of the sea. It was the end, he thought, and the beginning. Faces streamed away. A man with a pickaxe on his shoulder swung a red lamp; the smoke from the engine blew round him and obscured his light. The brakes ground, the clouds parted, and the setting sun flashed on the line, the window, and his eyes.

The fire-hole door opened and the blaze and the heat of the furnace for a moment emerged. The driver turned the regulator full open, and the footplate shook with the weight of the coaches. Presently the engine settled smoothly to its work and the last of the sun came out as the train passed through Bruges.

The sparks from the express then became visible, like hordes of scarlet beetles tempted into the air by night, they fell and smouldered by the track, touched leaves and twigs and cabbage-stalks and turned to soot.

As the darkness fell outside, the passengers through the glass could see only the transparent reflection of their own features. In the rushing reverberating express, the noise was so regular that it was the equivalent of silence, movement was so continuous that after a while the mind accepted it as stillness.”

I know that this is supposed to be a classic written by a noted author, but, I can't get excited by this book. While the story was interesting and had some memorable characters, the style of the prose left me confused on a number of occasions. Since this was my first Graham Greene novel, I will have to think hard and long before I pick up another to read.

Where did I pick up the notion that it was a good idea to at least try to read an author’s books from beginning to end – even if they’re not connected, just so you can get an impression of the author’s growth? I think it was Gun With Occasional Music, though that was mostly just because I liked the sound of it. Most writers, naturally, take a while to grow into their style, and don’t produce their best works until later in their career. Graham Greene, in any case, doesn’t make it easy for the modern reader working back over the English canon: not only were his books divided into “serious” novels and “entertainments,” but he was apparently not particularly fond of his debut, The Man Within, and hated his next two (The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall) so much that he refused to allow them to be republished. So we begin with Stamboul Train, his fourth novel but the first to gain any real traction; the faintest hint of a mention in his bibliography.

It’s not particularly good – or at least, I didn’t enjoy it. It follows the fortunes of a mixed bag of travellers (a journalist, a dancer, a novelist, a Jewish business magnate, a Serbian communist revolutionary) as they travel by express train from Ostend in the Netherlands to Istanbul in Turkey. Really, that should have been right up my alley: political intrigue, a train journey, Europe in interwar period, shades of the hugely underrated video game The Last Express. (Which, obviously, horse before the cart.)

But I found myself unenthused by it, and halfway through it became one of those novels where I was no longer waiting for it to grab me, and instead counting the number of pages left until it was finished. But does that matter, really, when Greene is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and I’ve never heard anybody mention Stamboul Train as one of his better novels? Probably not. It may be time to stop trying a new author with their first works, unless they sound particularly compelling.

3.5 ⭐
My first Greene.
Although he himself called this one to be an "entertainment" as compared to his other works, The Stamboul Train was anything but that. This is a thriller set during 1930s infused with themes of anti-semitism, communism, love, lust, homosexuality, crime & punishment (justified?).
To me more than the story, it was Greene's writing that left a lasting impression. Definitely going to add his other books to my TBR pile.

Destre xenofobe avanzano col passo dell'oca in Europa, attraversata dall'Oriente Express che traghetta un'umanità spaventata. Scordatevi il luccichio della prima classe, la lente di Greene é ferma sui personaggi che di volta in volta interpreta a suo modo. Czinner il politico comunista rivoluzionario sognatore che difende gli oppressi in un mondo marcio, Myatt il commerciante ebreo intento a gustarsi solo i piaceri del denaro e della carne, la ballerina Coral eterna vittima di un'umanità che non la risparmia mai. È una roulette russa dove chi saprà adattarsi e chi non ha ideali sopravviverà in un mondo di parvenu, truffatori e corruttori. Ho iniziato questo libro con l'idea di alternarlo ad un altro libro ma ne sono stata rapita.

In the 1930s a cross-section of society travels across Europe to Constantinople in the Orient Express. This is a Europe increasingly subject to authoritarianism and anti-Semitism. I had wanted to read this early novel by Greene for many years and have now done so. What does it teach? That in Greene's world the good do not necessarily receive justice, and the bad their just desserts.

Loads of people with different stories and different goals on one long distance train. In the beginning of the book I found it rather confusing and difficult to keep track of who was who. But the more they become entangled, the easier that becomes.

I am always very impressed with the character descriptions of Graham Greene. Ernest Hemingway once wrote: "As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand." And Graham Greene is very good at doing just that. He's very good at explaining the choices and attitudes of the different people in his book.

Some people have said that he is antisemitic with his description of the Jewish businessman, but I don't see the problem at all. Actually I rather liked him, and Graham Greene did explain some of the difficulties of being a Jew, the endless prejudices and sneers. How that can be antisemitic is beyond me.

The book ends rather abruptly, perhaps inevitably. The last choices seem quite dull, but then, when you think about it, this is probably the most realistic. (It reminds me a bit of the fatalistic style of the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, especially his book Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid).

I very much enjoyed this book for the atmosphere and the characters as far as we got to know them. However, it was such a short snapshot of the lives of so many people, that I keep wondering about all the things for which there was no space in this book. The history of the dancer and the doctor, the other women, the writer, the priest..

A between-planes airport purchase.

I chose it because the introduction is by Christopher Hitchens, but I was disappointed with his intro: He went on & on about the stereotypical Jew character & the character's relationship to the times (the book was written in 1932)...HOWEVER - there is a dyke character! who is a successful journalist (though not as successful as she would wish)and a heavy drinker and picks up mistresses for cohabitation!!! Hitchens paid her ZERO attention!!!! What about HER character's relationship to the times? is what I'd like to know.

As for the novel, Graham Greene, as usual, doesn't disappoint: An easy read, distinctive characters, interesting that they're built on stereotypes, the story builds up & moves somewhere & is never predictable...well, just keeps you guessing, you might say. Great setting, too, with some wonderful writing, and, personally, I love the time frame of the 30's, you get a real feeling for it.

Also - this edition is very well designed. If you do a lot of digital reading, this is a great book for revisiting paper. It's a gem - great cover, great paper, great layout.