Published in 1932, this was the novel that established the reputation of Graham Greene (1904-91), after three works that "are held to be of small account". In the US it was known as Orient Express, and that was also the name of the spinoff movie released in 1934 (which explains why Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, which also appeared in 1934, was entitled Murder on the Calais Coach in the US).

My audio-version was brilliantly narrated by Michael Maloney, who brings us the different voices and accents to perfection.


Sirkeci Station (terminus for the Orient Express), Istanbul, 2022

Stamboul Train -- whose plot revolves around the various characters on board the sleeper from Ostend to Istanbul (which Greene still calls Constantinople) -- is the first of what the author called his "entertainments" (in order to distinguish them from his more literary works). It was written specifically with the purpose of making some sorely needed money.

Many publishers bill it as an "espionage thriller", but that's a very misleading descriptor. Yes, we have a would-be revolutionary, travelling east under an alias, and there's a suspenseful storyline that follows him all the way to his sad fate. There's a botched rescue mission; and there are unpredictable armed men, acting threateningly in various capacities and for various motives. But the main thrust of the story is the characters and the time capsule of the train.

There is always a poignancy in a scenario depicting temporarily intersecting lives -- all suspended for a brief spell on a train or in a hotel -- and Stamboul Train conveys a strong sense of Fate, with lives thrown together, and then sundered by happenstance. At one point we have a section where snatches of conversation are recorded without identifying the speakers. The disembodied, disconnected voices match the blurring of the scenery through the train windows: "When a signal-box or a station lamp went by its image was cut into wedges by the streaks of opaque ice, so that for a moment the window of the train became a kaleidoscope in which the jumbled pieces of coloured glass were shaken."



Everyone is travelling with a different purpose:

Our incognito communist, Dr Richard Czinner, after a dramatic escape and many subsequent dreary years of exile, hopes to lead a communist revolution back in his homeland, Yugoslavia. Young ingenue Englishwoman Coral Musker is going to take up a new job on the chorus line of a theatre in Istanbul. Jewish businessman Carleton Myatt needs to sort out a crisis in the Constantinople branch of his currant enterprise. Josef Grunlich is fleeing the consequences of a murder he has committed. Quin Savory ("the Cockney genius", who "drops his aitches when he can remember to") is gathering material for some no doubt highly orientalist novel. Janet Pardoe is travelling (we learn later) to visit her guardian in Constantinople. And then there's journalist Mabel Warren, who turns out to be a key catalyst and connector. She's Janet's older lover, and her initial intention is to see off the object of her jealous affections, and also interview Savory, but she decides to travel on the train when she recognizes Czinner at Cologne. She uncovers his secrets, and badgers him relentlessly ("I'll make him speak. Somehow... I've got nearly twelve hours. I'll think of a way"). And by telegraphing the news to her office, she brings about his arrest at the Subotica border crossing.

So there's plenty of action. But a languid despair hangs over this story, and you emerge from it a little saddened and dispirited. Everything good the characters undertake seems to come to nothing...

This unease might reflect partly "the author's financial circumstances at the time he wrote it, and partly the gloom of the post-depression era in England. [In his 1971 autobiography] Greene wrote: 'The pages are too laden by the anxieties of the time and the sense of failure... By the time I finished Stamboul Train the day of security had almost run out. Even my dreams were full of disquiet.'"



Be that as it may, Greene begins with an epigraph from George Santayana -- "Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence" -- and this definitely sets the tone.

Dr Czinner's revolution goes off half-cock before he gets to Belgrade. But he resolves to continue his journey, and stand in solidarity with the captured rebels. He tries to make confession to a fellow-passenger who is a clergyman, but the man of God diverts off on a tangent about Freud, aided and abetted by Savory who chooses that moment to arrive. Ultimately, Czinner dies not in a headline-grabbing, martyr-creating execution, but in a shed full of sacks, after a foiled escape attempt.

Coral Musker sees the offer of becoming Carleton Myatt's mistress in Constantinople as a huge opportunity (they're too separated by class for marriage to ever be in question). But she is the sort of young woman -- soft-hearted (literally as well as figuratively, it emerges), and not especially confident, educated, or pretty -- who, you feel, is always going to be disappointed ("it's too good to be true" is her watchword). But she is kind, and self-sacrificing. Dragged into Czinner's problems by sheer ill luck, she refuses to leave him when he is wounded.

Carleton Myatt responds kindly and protectively to Coral's weakness (she takes ill on the train) and artless sweetness. He regards her presence in Constantinople, maybe even in London, as a good thing. But then -- by another of those stupid coincidences -- she gets separated from him, and is caught up unawares in the authorities' pursuit of Czinner. Myatt does go back to look for her -- at some risk to himself in this increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere -- but fails to locate her, and is ambivalent about that failure. And when he arrives in Constantinople, he's all the conniving businessman again, swanning around the city, giving orders to the Armenian hotel manager, and setting his cap at Janet (who, it turns out, is both half-Jewish -- a circumstance that makes her, he feels, more "accessible" -- and also the niece of Myatt's business rival).

The loathsome Grunlich, arrested for possessing a fire-arm at the same time as Czinner and Coral are picked up (and held with them in a temporary lock-up), helps them to escape, but then effectively hijacks Coral's ride by assuring Myatt that he has seen no young woman. We're sorry to see him fetch up like a bad penny again in Constantinople.

Mabel Warren, meanwhile, helps Coral to escape from the Yugoslav authorities, and is eying her up as a successor to Janet. But we leave Coral in a bad way, apparently suffering a heart attack. Does she get the chance to tell Mabel what happened to Czinner, and thus get the story out? We don't know.



Christopher Hitchens wrote in his Introduction to the 2004 edition: "Greene could be accused of peopling his train novel (or train script) with stock characters -- the showgirl who's seen it all; the political exile and conspirator travelling incognito; the butch lesbian with a weakness for drunken sentimentality -- and the charge of stereotype has been levelled with especial force against his portrayal of Myatt... Michael Shelden, Graham Greene's biographer, states roundly that Myatt is a deliberately ugly caricature of Jewishness... [Novelist David] Lodge maintains that he is represented as a Good Samaritan rather than a Shylock or a Fagin."

That last view was my impression, too, and I'm inclined to agree with Carl Cassegard, who writes: "The Jewish character, Carleton Myatt, is sympathetically portrayed; he is certainly not a caricature, but a complex character that one gets to know as one keeps on reading. Possessing conscience and acting as decently as anyone can expect, he is a better man than most. Furthermore, Greene consistently portrays anti-semitism as a trait of unlikable characters, while the good and sympathetic ones are free from it."

Still, as Hitchens says, in attempting to counter received opinion, Greene still deployed his own cliches (and the frequent reference to "the Jew" is as annoying and unnecessary as it was with Dickens all those years earlier).

This limited, inconsistent awareness also fits with what Cassegard identifies as an orientalist mentality, which portrays the journey from west to east as "a descent into Hell... [in which] each train stop marks a new and deeper hellish circle".

This view is certainly borne out by the way Greene describes Myatt's experiences. Exposed to casual antisemitism from the start, he comes under real threat when faced with populations further east: "In the small hungry eyes shone hatred and a desire to kill; it was as if all the oppressions, the pogroms, the chains, and the envy and superstition which caused them, had been herded into a dark cup of the earth and now he stared down at them from the rim... [He] was flurried, sunk in his fur coat, remembering the woman's cry of 'Dirty Jew', the sentry's eyes, the clerk's insolence. It was in some such barren quarter of the world, among frozen fields and thin cattle, that one might expect to find old hatreds the world was outgrowing still alive."

And yet -- just one year after the publication of Stamboul Train, Hitler came to power in what was very much a Western European country... Orientalism certainly leaves us vulnerable to blind spots.

On the orientalist implications of the ending, Cassegard has this to say: "After the horror of Subotica, the book ends with a seemingly incongruous idyllic chapter on Constantinople... This last chapter is the most lighthearted in the book and at first sight offers a happy ending. Yet in terms of the book’s structure, it is the culmination of Hell, its innermost pit. The happy ending is made possible by forgetting."

And it's true... Myatt has forgotten Coral, and climbed off his high horse with regard to what is happening in his business. Janet has forgotten Mabel. The stamping, whistle-blowing cabaret girls, with their cheery song ("waiting at the station for a near relation, puff, puff, puff, puff, the Istanbul train"), are now the reality; the actual journey is a forgotten dream.



Whatever conclusion the reader reaches about Greene's attitude to Jews, the caricature I hated the most was that of the lesbian woman, Mabel Warren, who is depicted, with zero nuance, as an alcoholic, slovenly, predatory, unscrupulous, antisemitic misandrist. Whereas I felt Greene was making some effort -- if a little ham-handedly -- to detach Myatt from the cloud of prejudice he had to deal with, I didn't detect any similar effort with regard to Mabel, who is relentlessly made to look pathetic.

A similar uncomprehending dismissiveness is expressed in the character of Savory. J.B. Priestley -- a hugely successful author whom high-brow contemporary writers seemed determined to disparage -- was so convinced the original character was based on him that he threatened a libel action on the eve of publication: "In the book's final version, the Cockney novelist does not have much in common with Priestley, but the text had to be rewritten at the last moment."

But I guess we have to remember that Greene was only in his late twenties when he wrote this book... It's not an age known for nuance.

Anyway, this was a fun prelude to our upcoming "series of trains from Istanbul" (not nearly such a snappy title), and in addition I gained two further suggestions for my book list. Firstly, reading about Priestley has made me determined to correct my complete unfamiliarity with his work; and secondly, Santayana also sounds really interesting... You see. It never ends.