I loved this book even though the version I read was called Stamboul Train, which was the original title I believe. There's something exhilarating about stories set on trains where the carriages are so narrow and the world outside is so wide, even though it is only glimpsed as it speeds by.

I didn't like any of the characters as they were written except for the journalist who was trying to do her job. All the others were escaping from reality or going to meet it head on. I marvel at Greene's variety of descriptions of what's happening in the world beyond the carriage window.

It's books such as this and Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear that make me wish I could have gone on journeys such as these in my own life.

Having said that, my next holiday will be mainly on trains and I hope I meet as many interesting people on my trip as were in the book - I just hope I like them.

We have already reviewed Greene's first novel ('The Man Within', 1929) and pronounced it pretty dreadful. Greene allowed that particular effort re-publication but refused the honour to his next two books which tells you something. Neither is currently available despite the fame of the author.

By 1931, he was getting a little desperate. 'Stamboul Train' (published in 1932 when he was still only 28) was a 'last throw of the dice' at becoming a respected novelist. He scraped through with something that sold sufficient copies and could be made into a film and the rest is history.

But what of the book itself. It is the first of Greene's 'entertainments' designed for a more popular market (in this case, playing on the glamour of the Orient Express and the fashion for political spy stories) but it is weakened by his determination to be over-literary.

It is not a major failure, however. It may not be as impressive as his later work but it contains a great deal of Greene's hallmarks - realistic characterisation, gloomy psychology, some religious torment and what often makes him great, a cinematic approach to story and description.

It is also occasionally overwritten and neither fish nor foul - neither literary masterpiece nor a well paced thriller of the Eric Ambler type. It falls between stools yet it remains interesting.

There is a strong element of literary 'snobbisme' working its way through some popular memes of the day. It is no accident that one of his least likeable characters is a popular novelist to the extent that he was to face a pre-publication threat of libel from his presumed target - J B Priestley.

Greene takes a set of popular stereotypes (the Jew, the chorus girl, the butch Lesbian who can also stand for journalist, the criminal psychopath, the 'popular novelist' and the well heeled girl down on her luck) and makes a decent fist at humanising them, even if the stereotype remains in place.

The characters come alive even while fitting within pre-set patterns. That is no mean achievement. Sometimes we know we are in Greeneland and are lost in it. If only, we say, the man would stop being so damned literary and (sometimes) dull about it.

The cinematic quality comes from the journey which reproduces what it must actually have been like to travel on that famous train in the interwar period, eschewing the glamour of Agatha Christie for a harsh realism. He also gets in his thing about men on the run and women.

There is also an Ambleresque engagement with political conditions in the Balkans although his stereotype (the tormented good doctor who is a communist) is the least convincing. This provides one of the main sub-plots and Greene plots very well.

The main story, of course, (being Greene) is not about politics or crime but about sex and love and faith and honesty and trust. The relationship between the Jew and the chorus girl is a story about the shallowness of love and its relationship to a hunger for freedom or security and circumstance.

Many commentators have felt uncomfortable at the portrayal of the Jew, Carleton Myatt, a young business-obsessed caricature, highly sensitive (not without reason) to his Jewishness and the Jewish condition. It is deemed antisemitic and an embarrassment in the light of events after 1932.

I do not share this concern, precisely because it was written in 1931/2 and not in 1933/34. Given the general antisemitism of the era, Greene more than humanises the caricature. He gives Myatt the dignity of being just like the rest of us in his emotional shallowness and insecurity.

If he is self-evidently and recognisably behaving as a Jew of 1930, this was probably close to the reality of what it was to be prosperously Jewish at that era just as the stereotype of the chorus girl (also a little patronising) was probably the same superficial reality of the chorus girl.

Having uncovered his stereotype (and that of Coral Musker and all the other characters), he then partially strips away the facade and creates believable if limited personalities whose pomposities, hates, lusts and insecurities are matched by examples of kindness, self-sacrifice and dignity.

In fact, Myatt is one of the more appealing characters in a book written during the gloom of the Depression (which infects the story throughout) even if we may not like what he is by the end. The point is that he is complex and real whereas antisemitism never permits complexity or realism.

A lot has been read into the book by critics but I suspect too much. Greene is a mildly depressed and confused young man of talent, still finding his voice. It is an entertainment precisely because it is not didactic. It skirts big issues but it rarely preaches and when it does, we are allowed to be bored.

The Communist ideologue is also interesting given the period. Again, a stereotype is humanised albeit with less success than most of the other characters. The man is a rigid narcissist with a death instinct but Greene gives him a background of just cause.

Like the good catholic he was becoming (too much could be made of a teenage flirtation with communism), Greene represents Marxism as drawn from genuine social problems but hollow at the centre because of its cold-hearted atheism and lack of complexity. This is Dr. Czinner.

We can be very grateful that this was a break-out book for all the drag of its flaws, his slow shedding of the cultural expectations required by 'great literature'. At one point, he tries a bit of modernism with film-style cutting between overlapping conversations. Er, no, Greene, don't!

What the book did was not only get him decent reviews and sales, maybe a chance for the upmarket to have something Ambler-like they could enjoy and the rest to have another Orient Express story, but that gold standard of popularity, a film deal even if the film is said to be no great shakes.

Intimacy of strangers...

As the Orient express makes its way from Ostend To Istanbul, the passengers on this long journey find themselves thrust into a kind of intimacy where secrets are revealed and character flaws are laid bare. Myers is a Jew in the currant business, going to Istanbul to supervise the purchase of a rival company. Coral Musker is a dancer, going out to join a dance group to replace a girl who has fallen ill. Mabel Warren, a journalist and a drunk, who is in the station at Ostend to see off the beautiful woman she loves, spots a man whom she recognises and jumps aboard as the train is about to leave. The man is travelling as Richard John, a teacher from a school in England, but Mabel knows he’s really Dr Czinner, who fled from Yugoslavia five years ago after giving evidence in the trial of a General in the ruling regime accused of rape. Czinner was then a prominent figure in the opposition to the dictatorship and Mabel realises that if he is now returning to Belgrade, there may be a story here that could get her a coveted byline on the front pages of her paper.

The book is set in the 1930s, and gives a real sense of the political unease throughout Europe in this between wars period. Through Czinner’s story, we see the rising clash of extreme right and left ideologies that scarred the twentieth century and, while Greene gives a sympathetic portrayal of Czinner as a man and an idealist, he indicates little belief that leftist regimes would be any better than the fascist dictatorships springing up across the continent. Poverty and inequality, Greene seems to suggest, make people open to any leader who convincingly promises to make life better, and those at bare subsistence level don’t much care what ideology that leader may be professing. Czinner wants to love his fellow man, and perhaps more importantly wants to be loved by him, but man is a fickle beast who will tend to follow the leader he fears most.

Greene’s treatment of Myers, the Jew, is undoubtedly problematic to modern eyes and makes for uncomfortable reading. However, if the reader can look past the surface, Greene is actually giving a remarkably sympathetic portrayal for that time. While accepting the perceived negative characteristics of Jews as actuality, Greene is seeking to show how, in Western Europe at least, they have developed in response to the discrimination and prejudice Jews have had to deal with on a daily basis. Jews, he suggests, who have run from pogroms before and fear that they will be driven out again from their new, uncertain places of refuge can hardly be blamed for their love of gold, as a form of portable security – a deposit against the need to buy acceptance in the now or future refuge elsewhere. We see Myers in a constant conflict of emotions. He is proud of his wealth and importance as the owner of a successful and growing business, but at the same time there is the constant anxiety of what we now call micro-aggressions and the growing fear, soon to be tragically justified, that those aggressions might at any time turn to violence. The race memory of centuries of persecution never sinks below the surface, and so he ingratiates himself to people he inwardly despises, and despises himself for doing so. Although I found some of this difficult reading, I felt that Greene was appealing for understanding and tolerance rather than intentionally contributing to the stereotyping that has done so much harm.

Mabel is also problematic as a character, in very similar ways. Greene is frank and open about her lesbianism in a way that was rare in literature as early as this. But he is a male author, writing in a time when lesbianism was still not openly discussed, and I felt again his portrayal relied too heavily on stereotypes, as if he was writing about something he didn’t properly understand. Like Myers, Mabel has more than her share of negative characteristics – she drinks, she hates men, she manipulates young women, she uses people without caring about the impact she may have on their lives, she wallows in self-pity. She is desperate for love, but Greene, perhaps unintentionally, gives the impression that lesbian love is doomed to be sordid and impermanent. Again, though, it seemed to me that he was seeking to elicit sympathy for her from a readership who largely would have no knowledge of the world of lesbian love and would mostly be heavily prejudiced against it. Mabel, he seems to be saying, is a horrible person, but how could she not be when her whole life has been one rejection after another, when the world treats her as a living perversion?

Coral, happily, is considerably easier to like and to pity – a young woman alone in the world and tired of the insecurity of poverty. She may seem weak and some might judge her immoral but she has her reasons, and in the end she’s the one who shows herself to have the warmest heart.

The story itself is excellent, taking the characters into unfamiliar and frightening situations that will reveal them to themselves as much as to us. As with most Greene, it’s not exactly uplifting – in fact, in some ways it’s downright depressing – and there are no real heroes. But there is warmth and sympathy here, all under the already looming shadow of the horrors soon to be unleashed across Europe. I considered deducting a star for the stereotyping problems, but having allowed the book to settle in my mind for a few weeks, I really feel that it deserves to be cut some slack for the time of writing and for what I feel were Greene’s good intentions; and the quality of the writing, the storytelling and the humanity of it put it up there amongst Greene’s best for me.

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Blatantly anti-Semitic

As usual for Graham Greene this is well written with well drawn characters travelling on the Orient Express from Ostend to Istanbul with various stops between. There isn't much plot, more a series of interconnected vignettes. Interesting characters, some quite unpleasant. Unfortunately it is blatantly anti-Semitic which ruined the whole thing for me. It does no good to note that many people were anti-Semitic between the wars. Many were not. Of those who were, Adolf Hitler comes to mind.

I needed a cross-country airplane read for my flight home from Florida, leaving my outbound title of "Last Train from Lisbon" as an offering in my friend's guest room. In exchange, I got permission to take her tattered edition of Graham Greene's "Orient Express." In that way, I mused, the theme of trains and traveling was reinforced. I had reread Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havanna" just last year, followed by Pico Iyer's literary memoir "The Man Within My Head." As a life-long expat, Iyer grapples with Graham Greene as his internalized model of a wandering writer who seems to accompany him in his own life. In the flyleaf Graham Greene is credited with originating the suspense novel. That seems a stretch but he certainly can be credited with portraying characters who succumb to moral quandaries. The book is written in 1933, when Fascism is beginning to emerge in Europe. The characters on the train seem to have washed up into the 1930's after the great optimism and effervescence of the 1920's went flat with the Crash of 1929. A chorus girl is on her way to Istanbul for a questionable gig; a Jewish businessman in the fruit trade is also heading there to confront his suspect partner; a Lesbian journalist is tracking another passenger who may be a former Communist from Yugoslavia. All of the characters seem flawed, with mixed motivations. There is no clear-cut hero or villain. But that is Graham Greene's specialty – human beings who are selfish but also capable of redemption. There is no Monsieur Poirot here to give us a sense of reassurance. We must muddle through this train ride and we know there has to be a murder. Although the atmosphere is dark, Graham Greene paints each character vividly so the reader is in the train compartment at close range with each of them, feeling alternatively dread and hope that somehow, each one can find happiness, or at least survival. Although the book feels dated, it is convincing and the detail both cliche and classic. Eighty years later, Graham Greene is worthwhile.

Long-distance train journeys are different from most other forms of travel, in that one often meets people whose lives one touches briefly, and never sees again. In this book  Graham Greene captures well the ephemeral nature of such acquaintances.

We meet a varied cast of characters, travelling to different places for different reasons. Some join the train at the Start of the journey at Ostend, and leave it at various places along the route. Others join it, quite unexpectedly. A journalist who discovers a famous revolutionary is aboard the train in disguise, a criminal on the run from the police, who catches it because it left before the train he was expecting to travel on it. Some leave it unexpectedly, and other who intended to leave it continue their journey.

I found the ending rather disappointing, however. One character, a Jewish businessman (Greene mages a great deal of his being Jewish) travels the whole distance to Constantinople, but we do not see the last part of the journey, and the fate of most of the other passengers is left hanging, but then that is the character of train journeys.

3,5.

İstanbul Treni, kötü bir roman değil, sadece -bence- akıcılık konusunda bir problem var. Kitap, ilk yarıda çoğunlukla karakterleri tanıtıyor; fakat ikinci yarıda olay biraz daha ön plana çıkıyor ve kitap birden bir hayli merak uyandırıcı bir hale geliyor.

1930'larda bir Yahudi iş adamı, bir komünist doktor, bir lezbiyen gazeteci, bir revü kızı, bir hırsız ve katil İstanbul'a giden bir trene biniyor ve hepsinin bir şekilde yolları kesişiyor.

Greene, söz konusu karakterler üzerinden dönemin toplumunun bu farklılıklara bakışını çok uzun olmayan bu romanda bence başarılı şekilde anlatmış; fakat dediğim gibi ne yazık ki ilk yarıda bir durağanlık söz konusu.

Graham Greene scrive "Il treno per Istanbul" nel 1932. Sono quegli anni che, in uno sguardo a posteriori, sono considerati una specie di inter-regno fra le due Guerre Mondiali. Spesso, si guarda a quegli anni, specialmente gli anni '30, cercando disperatamente i presagi dell'orrore che sarebbe venuto. Come uno stagno in cui il sasso della Seconda Guerra Mondiale debba necessariamente aver generato dei cerchi che possono essere rintracciati nel passato. Questa smania di ricerca della profezia è comprensibile. Da una parte ci trasmette l'idea che il futuro, in fondo, era inevitabile, la profezia questo fa: prevede ciò che è deterministicamente impossibile evitare. Dall'altra, ci serve anche come forma di rassicurazione sul nostro presente: se non vediamo i segnali dell'orrore che sta per accadere, se nessuno fa profezie su quell''orrore, allora possiamo vivere relativamente tranquilli: non ci sono tragedie all'orizzonte. Tutto questo per dire che "Il treno per Istanbul" con la sua storia di umanità e di disperazione si presta perfettamente a una simile lettura profetica. E' innegabile che su tutto il romanzo di Greene aleggi un senso di tragedia imminente, di fatalismo e disperazione. Ancor di più se si pensa che uno dei personaggi principali è Myatt, ricco ebreo che viene spesso discriminato e che arriva perfino a scorgere negli occhi di una guardia serba gli occhi di chi potrebbe compiere un pogrom.
Eppure, il valore del romanzo di Greene non è tanto nel suo essere profetico (non lo è, nessun libro lo è veramente), quanto nel riuscire a cogliere l'atmosfera di ansia e paranoia dell'Europa degli anni '30. Sull'Orient Express che va da Ostenda (Belgio) a Istanbul troviamo un gruppo di persone disparate e disperate. Abbiamo la ballerina, il ricco ebreo, il finto dottore che sta tornando alla sua rivolta, la giornalista e la sua dama di compagnia, uno scrittore piuttosto noioso e così via. Greene nello spazio ristretto del treno, claustrofobico e opprimente proprio come il cielo che descrive, spesso innevato o grigio, fa emergere i conflitti di classe fra i diversi passeggeri, mostrando una società dilaniata. Ma, soprattutto, mette in scena il fallimento di questi personaggi. Su tutti spicca la grandezza del fallimento del dottore, con i suoi ideali e la sua rivolta, il suo muoversi non soltanto in ritardo, ma nella completa inutilità. I movimenti dei personaggi di Greene sono simili a quelli del treno stesso: tanto inevitabili, quanto privi di ogni reale controllo. E' come se ognuno di loro fosse messo su un proprio binario, e, con profonda malinconia e rimpianto, accettassero fatalmente il proprio destino.
"Una luce morbida inondava gli scompartimenti. Per un momento sarebbe stato possibile credere che il sole fosse l'espressione di qualcosa che amava gli uomini e per loro soffriva". L'umanità che descrive Greene è un'umanità tragica. Non è quasi mai grottesca - tranne, non a caso, la coppia di borghesi. E' un'umanità brutta, profondamente in ritardo e infelice. Ognuno di loro è solo nonostante lo spazio ristretto del treno. La grande capacità di Greene è quella di costruire un racconto corale in pochissime pagine, dando a ogni personaggio una personalità, un ruolo, profondamente definito e personale, ma al contempo comune a quello di tutti gli altri. Non c'è salvezza, non c'è cambiamento, non c'è speranza, in questo cupissimo romanzo di Graham Greene. Eppure, trasuda umanità. Tutto, secondo me, può essere racchiuso in questa meravigliosa immagine: "Si sentiva le labbra inaridite da una vera e propria sete di rettitudine, che era come un bicchiere d'acqua gelata sul tavolino nella stanza di qualcun'altro".

This story takes place mostly on a train. They are traveling ultimately to Istanbul. Some are getting off at Vienna, some to Budapest, others all the way to Istanbul. We have a variety of characters. When we first meet them we don't know who any of them are, but as their lives intertwine, sometimes colliding, we discover that someone is traveling on business, another is a chorus girl, another a famous writer, one is a crook, one is a rapid reporter who by accident discovers yet another passenger whose purpose is more important than all of the others'.

Graham's narration passes from person to person showing us their inward thoughts. Some are confused, others desperate, a couple are intensely selfish and one is sincerely noble, although in my opinion, the most misguided of all.

The story line moves at a healthy clip and there is also suspense as the readers wonders how each individual's fate is going to conclude, but for me the most fascinating was Graham's insight into human character and how people think.

Nice to read Graham Greene again. He has a way of unfolding a story. It's basically a series of events on the Orient Express from Ostend to Constantinople, how the lives of varios people intertwine; who gets on where and their stories. Loved it.

9 OCT 2018 - Well-written and peopled with individuals who hide behind caricatures of who they really are (or intend to be).

[9/10]



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. If I could sleep, he thought with longing, I could remember more clearly all the things that have to be remembered.

Why would an author sell his own work short? ( In Stamboul Train for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks after his own and I succeeded in both aims. ). Graham Greene considered "Stamboul Train" one of his lesser novels, a commercial 'light' thriller, but to me it reads just as good as one of his classic stories of religious or emotional distress. The same major themes of faith, love, identity, social justice, clinical depression and forgiveness of sins are present in this rolling microcosm of the larger world.

Before starting on the actual journey by luxury train from the English Channel to the sea of Marmara, two excerpts are useful to set the mood: the epigraph by George Santayana:

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

... and the preface written by Christopher Hitchens:

The essence of Greeneland, if one may dare to try and define it, is the combination of the exotic and the romantic with the sordid and the banal. Those who travel and depart, says the poet Horace, only change their skies and not their condition. The meanness of everyday existence is found at the bottom of every suitcase, and has in fact been packed along with everything else. Nonetheless, it is sometimes when they are far from home and routine that people will stir to make an unwonted exertion of the spirit or of the will.

We are all travelers through life, and this train journey imagined by Greene captures several characters at a turning point, first charmed by the romance of a new beginning, of leaving the old habits behind and hoping for a better future in that far-off, exotic point of arrival. Tragedy, disillusionment, compromise and resignation are what Fate has decreed instead.

A tender light flooded the compartments. It would have been possible for a moment to believe that the sun was the expression of something that loved and suffered for men. Human beings floated like fish in golden water, free from the urge of gravity, flying without wings, transported in a glass aquarium. Ugly faces and misshapen bodies were transmuted, if not into beauty, at least into grotesque forms fashioned by a mocking affection. On that golden tide they rose and fell, murmured and dreamed. They were not imprisoned, for they were not during the hour of dawn aware of their imprisonment.

Carleton Myatt, a young man running to fat, ostentatiously dressed, flaunting his wealth, is going to Istanbul on a business assignment. Richard John, a middle-aged doctor traveling under a false name, is returning to Belgrade to face the consequences of his earlier political actions. Q. C. Savory, a popular novelist risen from the poor quarters of London, is traveling East in search of inspiration. Mr. Opie, a clergyman, is traveling to Budapest on holiday and seems more interested in cricket than in spiritual matters. Coral Musker, a chorus girl, hopes to keep hunger and extreme poverty at bay with a new singing and dancing act in Istanbul. Boarding the train along the way are 'Dizzy' Mabel Warren, a forceful older woman reporter hunting for the ultimate scoop for her tabloid, Janet Pardoe, a beautiful society girl of ambiguous sexual preferences and Joseph Grunlich, a ruthless thief and opportunist on the run from Vienna after his latest heist ends in murder.

Each of these personages is fascinating in its own particular mannerisms and aspirations, but two developments stood out for me : a touching romance between the rich Jew boy and the chorus girl, of the sort that usually blooms on long voyages where social norms and a sense of personal obligations is momentarily suspended ( He could not help remembering that he was growing fat and that he was traveling in currants and not with a portfolio of sealed papers. Nor is she a beautiful Russian countess, but she likes me and she has a pretty figure. ), and the more momentous drama of Dr. Czinner, the dreamer who embraced Communism hoping to improve the lives of the poor workers in Belgrade, the man who ran away to England when the chief of police started a personal vendetta against him, the atheist who thirsts for faith, the lost soul in search of redemption that is the closest I can come to describe as a typical Greene hero.

He could do nothing for his own people; he could not recommend rest for the worn-out or prescribe insulin to the diabetic, because they had not the money to pay for either.

then,
He found himself praying: 'God forgive me.' But he was shut off from any assurance of forgiveness, if there existed any power which forgave. [...] The priest's face turned away, the raised fingers, the whisper of a dead tongue, seemed to him suddenly as beautiful, as infinitely desirable and as hopelessly lost as youth and first love in the corner of the viaduct wall.

also,
His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.

Many readers will probably pick the half ludicrous, half tragic confrontation between Czinner and the border guards as he tries to re-enter his home country as the high point of the novel, but what I remember best right now is a conversation in a train compartment between the doctor, the clergyman and the novelist : one man painfully looking for answers, one man comfortably numb in his preconceptions and self-interest, one who sold his sensibility and talent for success. Greene touches here on similarities between psychoanalysis and confession, on literature as a tool for self discovery ('your novel is a confession only in so far as a dream is a confession'), but most of all he dwells on the inability of the church as an institution to offer a path to salvation and on the ultimately solitary, intimate struggle that every man must take on the way to Golgotha. Dr. Czinner gets no solace from Opie or from Savory, and at the end of the journey the hand that will reach out for him  in vain  will be that of another lost soul  Coral Musker  . The Orient Express is revealed as one more metaphor of our journey through life:

He saw the express in which they had traveled breaking the dark sky like a rocket. They clung to it with every stratagem in their power, leaning this way and that, altering the balance now in this direction, now in that. One had to be very alive, very flexible, very opportunist. [...] 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.



—«»—«»—«»—

"Stamboul Train" gave me more food for thought than I initially expected. It is not without flaws (mostly regarding some obvious anti-semitic passages and some 'red scare' anti-communist attitudes), but overall it was just as good as my previous forays into what Hitchens calls 'Greeneland'. As a bonus, I now want to revisit "Ship of Fools" by Katherine Anne Porter.