One of Greene's early novels.
It was an interesting premise - a number of unconnected characters on the Orient Express from Ostend to Constantinople, whose story becomes connected - and the characters are interesting and built well.
It seems like an opportunity was missed however when events took place off the train, which seemed to distract from, or weaken the story a little for me.
I was also a bit confused about the route of the train, as according to Wikipedia, the train never followed the route of the book: Ostend - Cologne - Vienna - Budapest - Belgrade - Constantinople. Wikipedia Orient Express

Anyways, no spoilers, as the characters do a good job of providing information as the book progresses, so I wouldn't want to ruin it...
A comfortable three stars for me.

Questo libro mi riporta alla lettura dopo un periodo di blocco. Molto coinvolgente, ho apprezzato molto lo stile di Greene, non avevo mai letto niente di suo, ma nonostante i numerosi personaggi che si intrecciano in questo romanzo, non ho faticato a seguire le diverse tracce e a lasciarmi trascinare nelle vicende e nella psicologia dei protagonisti. Fondamentalmente pessimista, lascia poco spazio alla speranza o a una fine che si possa davvero dire lieta, ma l'ho trovato realistico, anche se forse un po' cinico.

n  ” Avanti e indietro, avanti e indietro nel corridoio,
lei aveva visto il medico camminare,
avvinghiandosi a quella solitudine e preferendola ad uno scompartimento con altri viaggiatori.”n


Un libro pieno di speranze disattese.
Immagini dolorose per quella solitudine umana che condanna tutti ad essere chiusi nei propri pensieri, limitati dalla propria prospettiva e costruttori di certezze a cui ci si aggrappa come disperati, finchè le crepe diventano baratri in cui si scivola.
.
Un treno è un luogo dove, inevitabilmente, s’incrociano gli sguardi.
Se quel treno è, però, a lunga percorrenza gli sguardi diventano dialoghi e la possibilità di relazioni aumenta.
Se quel treno poi si chiama "Orient Express" entra in gioco la dimensione storica.

Da Ostenda ad Istanbul.
Dal cuore dei rancori europei( i cui umori agitati presagiscono una realtà fatta di odio e violenza che sta per tracimare) alla capitale turca così bifronte nel suo essere contemporaneamente Occidente ed Oriente.

Greene non solo accompagna il lettore gradualmente a conoscere le storie private ma ci fa intravedere il doppio fondo che può esserci in ognuna di esse.

Colpisce il sottotitolo:" Un Divertimento".
C’è poco da ridere: la vita che scorre dietro ai finestrini s’intravede a malapena tra il ghiaccio che copre i vetri.
Scorre ed è già dimenticata se non fosse per una malinconia costante che non abbandona i passeggeri.
Ecco, mi viene da pensare che forse questo divertimento ha più un significato etimologico piuttosto che letterario.
Forse è da recuperare nel suo uso latino e quindi:
divèrtere, ossia, “volgere altrove deviare”.

Il destino è, infatti, qualcosa che si compie in modi, tempi e luoghi inaspettati come la fermata ad un’innocua stazioncina di un villaggio serbo...


”Ma nel rimbombare del treno in corsa il rumore era così regolare da equivalere al silenzio, il movimento era così continuo che dopo un po’ di tempo la mente lo accettava come immobilità. Soltanto fuori del treno era possibile la violenza dell’azione, e per tre giorni il treno avrebbe tenuto al sicuro lui e i suoi progetti”

Carleton Myatt meets Coral Musker on the train to Stamboul, and they both meet Joseph Grunlich, Doctor Czinner, Janet Pardoe, Mr Q.C Savory and Mable Warren. The story explores people's reason for being on the train and the adventures they hope to find or are in fact escaping.

The train makes a three-day journey from Ostend to Istanbul where the majority of the book's passengers join from the ferry from England; others join and leave at Cologne, Vienna or Subotica in Serbia.

The book is enjoyable and characters are likeable and shallow; trustworthy, feisty and self-centred - some are all of these and more. The scenes on the train and off are well described and the place and importance of class and occupation is played to the full, as are the glimmers of independent and determined women, alongside men of business, crime and politics.

This is a story written in 1932 so one has to accept (one may not like or agree with) the characterisation and language used, and indeed the thoughts and conversation of and with Jewish characters from both those who are and aren't Jews.

At its heart the story is about people and their behaviours, loyalties, hopes, choices, and loves on a train through a Europe that has undergone change since 1918, and will continue to change greatly in the years ahead.

STAMBOUL TRAIN

Discovering this gem of a book brought with it a whole host of surprises – not least that it proved to be a real page-turner, bursting with 'colour' in Graham Greene’s inimitable monochrome style (if you see what I mean).

Stamboul is of course Istanbul and the train the Orient Express – that this is a journey of death and intrigue published two years before the eponymous Agatha Christie murder mystery was another revelation to me.

For two novels, so close in time, title and substance, they are otherwise like chalk and cheese. Christie’s express might get trapped in the snow, but throughout there is a degree of comfort and warmth that would melt the hardest Camembert. Conversely, life aboard Greene’s draughty, cold and rattling train, with its shared compartments and riotous third-class carriages has an entirely different feel, the chronic discomfort of a perpetually scratched blackboard.

Like the train itself the story picks up and discards characters, but the fleetingly parallel threads of their lives are cleverly intertwined. Be prepared for outcomes that will seem cruel and unsentimental.

The same can be said of the hierarchy of themes – an insignificant chorus girl naïve to the world; an opportunistic businessman and a peripatetic crook; a dogmatically honourable partisan bent upon revolution – a spectrum that spans from the banal to the grandiose, set against a powder-keg backdrop of simmering racism and impending terror in pre-World War II Europe.

Downsides? Sporadically the author lapses into rather impenetrable and abstract prose – just when you want to get your teeth into the story! And there is one loose end left dangling, frustrating if like me you invested emotional capital in that particular outcome!

Recommended.

My second reading of this second novel by Greene proved to be even more rewarding than ever. It is incredible how, right in this early work, so much of his trademark qualities - great characterization, gripping atmosphere, nimble suspense, almost dream-like surrealism and even a trenchant sense of empathy and objectivity - are to be found in simply two hundred and twenty pages of a novel that hurtles along at a great pace and manages to be both a twitching thriller and a tragic tale of loss of innocence and a doomed love story of sorts. Nobody, it seems, could have done it apart from Greene with his astonishing gift for economy, elegance and a Machiavellian sense of wisdom. Utterly, utterly unforgettable.

I love Chris Moore's cover art, front & back, on this Peacock (Penguin) paperback edition; reset and reprinted from the Collected Edition, 1975.

Set in Spring, and enigmatically subtitled “An Entertainment”, this slim, haunting fantasy, reset and reprinted from the Collected Edition 1975, explores social interactions and relationships; some conventional, some intimate, some lonely, some socially unacceptable, formed and broken, queried and challenged, during the rather other-worldly course of a three day railway journey from Ostend to Constantinople. Greene’s characters are as varied, curious and surprising as any one might reasonable expect in a novel seeking and probing how unfamiliarity can transform perception and reaction into curiosities of possibility.

I wonder if Graham Greene has ever written a bad sentence. It’s incredible that this book, which he deemed one of his mere ‘entertainments’, has more depth and texture than many a literary novel.

On route this masterful suspense narrative, which hums along with deft character sketches and brilliantly witty scenes, the novel trips you up with its perspicacious phrases and nonchalant aphorisms. ‘The nearest he could attain to hate was envy.’ ‘Suspicion only dishonors the suspicious.’ or, as the sly, rotund criminal of the book Josef Grunlich reflects wryly on his craft facing better forensics, ‘Crime grew more unsafe every year.’

Mabel Warren—the cynical, sauced, disheveled, square-jawed, butch journalist—deserves her own book. Her scenes are completely hilarious. With terrific if perhaps misspent erudition, she both connives with and conspires against the political exile she discovers on board the train, fantasizes about how her scoop-takedown-exposure of him will bolster her fortunes, the better to endear her to the woman in her life and those she longs for, harangues the train attendants and ticket agents, and besottedly battles the bottle throughout.

A poignant theme of the book is the tenacious loyalty to one another that some of the characters display and/or yearn for.
The darkest and most startling theme is the anti-semitism. I guess I was ignorant of the fact that by 1931 when this book was written these hateful, bigoted views were already on the boil throughout Europe.

Greene captures a harrowing and prescient truth in deciphering where these ‘old hatreds’ still lurk. When Myatt, the Jewish character, innocent but caught up in a plot entanglement, fearful because he is being questioned by ‘insolent’ aggressive soldiers out in the hinterlands, we get:
‘It was in some such barren quarter of the world, among the frozen fields and thin cattle, that one might expect to find old hatreds the world was outgrowing still alive.’

Nearly ninety years after Greene wrote that sentence, it is clear, as our gruesome current demagoguery has both stoked and unveiled, that that is still where those old hatreds lurk, even as our world strives to put them to rest.

Greene has once again created an assortment of memorable misfits: a pushy, possessive, female, English journalist with her attractive, seemingly-flighty, young companion; a shrewd, young Jewish businessman and his colleagues in Constantinople; a mysterious, middle-aged doctor whose past unfolds during the journey; a penny-less dancer in search of love; a proud author, plus other characters acquired along the route.

They are east-bound on a train to Constantinople. In the beginning I could not see where Greene was going with the story nor keep the characters straight. As it all became clearer, I had high hopes for what I call ‘redemption’ – a character (or characters) acting out of character or rising above expectations. Some did and some didn’t. The ending was achingly disappointing. I had hoped for more from a pivotal person among the passengers. There was one key decision—which was the climax of the book—and impacted several lives for the rest of their lives. Even though this much is hidden I won’t say more, except that I was deeply saddened by the choice. To me it was the ‘gem’ of great price thrown away.

I had written a different review, but after reflecting on a friend’s review I have so revised my own.

A train journey to remember. Interesting that Greene wrote this in 1932/3.

Graham managed to get all the way to Page 2 of this book before pissing me off with his casual embrace of the worst kinds of racism. That aside, this book as a lot to recommend it.

This was the first commercially successful book of Greene's, and I imagine it fell onto the English public with a bang. It is ingeniously plotted, clearly written and full of the sorts of snap judgements that pass for sophistication among the educated English of the '30's. We follow the intertwined fates of six or seven people who climb aboard a train bound for Istanboul.

At least one character does not make it, and Greene writes movingly of a person's last thoughts as he sinks into death (p. 152 in my Penguin edition):

The world was chaotic; when the poor were starved and the rich were not happier for it; when the thief might be punished or rewarded with titles; when wheat was burned in Canada and coffee in Brazil, and the poor in his own country had no money for bread and starved to death in unheated rooms; the world was out of joint and he had done his best to set it right, but that was over. He was powerless now and happy...He had done all that he could do; nothing was expected of him; they surrendered him their hopelessness, the secret of their beauty and their happiness as well as of their grief, and they led him towards the leafy rustling darkness.

The characters are well-rendered and recognizably human (if rather annoyingly conforming to stereotype). One thing I found a little odd is the speed with which the characters' fates pivoted during the journey -- most of them underwent truly life-changing events on a trip that only lasted three days. But that, I suppose, is both the license and duty of a novelist -- to make life grander and more exciting than it actually is.

The characters, travelling by train from Belgium through to Constantinople, are well-developed but odd choices.

Myatt the Jewish character is often no more than a caricature of a large-nosed, money-loving Jew. Greene's antisemitism has been debated, but I did find it overt when he refers to the characteristics of Myatt's race. But Greene also shows Myatt as a man of character with a conscience and great empathy.

The old Serbian communist doctor returning home to a bleak fate was another strange choice for a protagonist. Much of the book takes place in Subotica, a town in Serbia/Yugoslavia on the Hungarian border. Yugoslavia is not the most famous setting in Greeneland. And the politics of a socialist/communist revolt there must have been quite obscure to Greene's readers in the early 1930s.

The English chorus girl Coral is uneducated and unsure of herself but resilient when she gets arrested in Serbia as the doctor's unwilling accomplice. A Lesbian journalist and a comic Austrian thief round out the main cast. Much of the book details the characters' inner monologues and struggles not to show their true feelings and motivations to others. An interesting novel, but Greene became a clearer, more straightforward writer later on.

A film of this was made in 1934 - and it has a rating of over 7 out of 10 on IMBD. Anything over 7 usually means it's a good movie. I can't find it anywhere online.

At the start of the rail journey to Istanbul the reader meets the passengers (rail, boat, airplane with confined spaces, and the randomness of fellow travellers are always a great set-up). Comparisons with the renowned Agatha Christie Murder On the Orient Express are unavoidable and I was interested to note that the USA version of Stamboul train is titled “Orient Express”. Greene’s book was published two years before Christie and I imagine there was some annoyance between publishing houses at the time.

Once we know the main protagonists in Stamboul Train, the book is a study in the human condition. Secrets, anonymity, manners, but not a great deal of religious contemplation normally a staple in Greene’s novels. The church is represented by Mr. Opie in Stamboul Train, but he barely contributes. The plot is instead one of state repression and suppression, and in keeping with the times, the bourgeoisie are portrayed as the enemy within (this is just thirteen years after the Russian Revolution), focused on Serbia.

No single character anchors the book, and while Dr. Czinner is suitably reflective, philosophical and resigned, he is a rather lesser character than those in more renowned Greene works (Querry in A Burnt-Out case, for example).
I’ve always associated Greene with predominantly male lead characters and so it was refreshing, and I thought successful, to read about two very different female leads. Carol Musker announces herself (from a popular song at the time as “a girl that men forget”) Mabel Warren is a newspaper hound sniffing out a story and her feral pursuit of front page news was excellent.

The portrayal of Carlton Myatt, “a Jew” is rather more uncomfortable reading. I have to assume that the personal and racial stereotypes assigned to the character are designed, by Greene, to expose unwarranted hated and prejudice. In 1932, Hitler’s rise in Germany was well underway. Myatt is largely a heroic figure, but nonetheless I found the passages in which he appears treading the line uneasily between parody and prejudice.
Some Greene insights, and some descriptions are memorable. As a frequent train traveller myself, I immediately related to the casual observation of the country rushing past the window:

“the village was so far from the line that it remained still… while the trees and cottages on the near bank.. fled backwards”

The word “bourgeois” seems rather dated today, and is used only by academic historians of the great class struggles of the late c.18th and early 19th century. Greene, though is a man ahead of his time as he has Czinner ponder the changing times, and ultimately the dream “not for new territory but for a new world”.
He says
“The aeroplane doesn’t know a frontier; even your financers don’t recognise frontiers”
Globalism anticipated.

I’m glad to have read Stamboul Train and while I think this is very much a book of its time, I didn’t find the underlying observations dated.