Stamboul Train

Contents

About the Book

Carleton Myatt meets Coral Musker, a naïve English chorus girl, aboard the Orient Express as it heads across Europe to Constantinople. As their relationship develops, they find themselves caught up in the fates of the other passengers and drawn into a web of espionage, murder and lies...

About the Author

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in 1991.

Novels

The Man Within

It's a Battlefield

A Gun for Sale

The Confidential Agent

The Ministry of Fear

The Third Man

The End of the Affair

A Burnt-out Case

Travels with my Aunt

Dr Fischer of Geneva
or

The Bomb Party

The Human Factor

The Tenth Man

The Quiet American

England Made Me

Brighton Rock

The Power and the Glory

The Heart of the Matter

The Fallen Idol

Loser Takes All

Our Man in Havana

The Comedians

The Honorary Consul

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

Short Stories

Collected Stories

The Last Word and Other Stories

May We Borrow Your Husband?

Travel

Journey Without Maps

The Lawless Roads

In Search of a Character

Getting to Know the General

Essays

Yours etc.

Reflections

Mornings in the Dark

Collected Essays

Plays

Collected Plays

Autobiography

A Sort of Life

Ways of Escape

Fragments of an Autobiography

A World of my Own

Biography

Lord Rochester's Monkey

An Impossible Woman

Children's Books

The Little Train

The Little Horse-Bus

The Little Steamroller

The Little Fire Engine

For Vivien with all my love

Introduction

Many of the admirers of Graham Greene – those of us, that
is, who chose to spend some part of our reading lives in
voluntary exile in the exotic locale colloquially known as
‘Greeneland' – became familiar with the whims of the president
of this remote yet familiar territory. One of those whims
(benign enough, as befitted a rather lenient and tolerant
authority) was the division of his fictions into novels and
‘entertainments.' And the first-born of the latter category was
Stamboul Train
or, as it has been variously titled,
Orient
Express
or
Stamboul Express
. Dr. Samuel Johnson once
remarked that only a fool wrote for anything but money, and
Greene himself was bracingly candid about the motives for
his bifurcation. As he informed the audience of his autobiography,
Ways of Escape
:

The law of unintended consequences is designed in part for
authors who make decisions in this way under the lash
of financial exigency: one need only think of those works of
Greene's which were translated into film but which did not
begin life as potential scripts.
The Third Man
(which he actually
did write as a treatment) would be preeminent, followed
by
Brighton Rock
, but one should also tip one's hat to
The
Comedians
,
Travels with My Aunt
,
Our Man in Havana
,
The Power and the Glory
, and
The Quiet American
. The ‘entertainment'
of Stamboul Train – as I shall call it from now on – was designed and ready-made for motion pictures but nonetheless counts as Greene's worst filmic flop. Indeed, as he himself
so wryly put it, continuing the quoted sentence above:

When Graham Greene employs a well-worn phrase such as
‘the devil looks after his own' one does well to look for the
trace of irony. Although this book does not belong at all in
the category loosely known as his ‘Catholic' novels, it does
contain the themes of self-sacrifice and betrayal, and a sort
of Gethsemane as well as a sort of Calvary. Its disgrace as a
film was, in his mind, a partial revenge for its catch-penny
intentions. But this turns out to be a useful if not fortunate
failure, because it enables us to read the book without having
to do so through the prism of any later celluloid distortion.

Subsequent images nonetheless do colour the way in which
we approach it. Agatha Christie's
Murder on the Orient
Express
, the drama of
The Lady Vanishes
, and Ian Fleming's
From Russia with Love have all put the continental express
at the centre of modern romance and adventure. I used to
work, in an even lowlier capacity than the one in which Greene
had once toiled, at the offices of
The Times
in Printing House
Square, and until it was demolished I always derived a thrill
from the chiselled stone facings of the Blackfriars station opposite,
which listed the destinations of Berlin, Warsaw, and St.
Petersburg. Even in this register, the name of Istanbul, or
Stamboul, or Constantinople, would come out top. The
Golden Horn, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, the dome
of Saint Sophia . . . these evocations have spelled ‘romance and adventure' since before John Buchan's
Greenmantle
(which Greene avowed as an early and decisive influence on
his own imagination).

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 or 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.

This isn't obvious at first in this case, because both Myatt
and Coral Musker have embarked for mundane reasons (a
business crisis and a job opportunity, respectively) and because
there are ways in which trains conspire to suspend animation:

At the time it was written, this would have recalled to many
minds the famous image coined by Winston Churchill, of
Lenin being carried like a ‘bacillus' in a ‘sealed train' from
Germany to St. Petersburg. And on the Orient Express, also,
there is infection and illness. It is this which throws Coral
Musker together first with the Communist Dr. Czinner, who
is on his own private mission of revolution, and then with
Myatt, the self-conscious Jew. The encounter with Czinner
gives Greene the chance for a beautiful moment of inversion
or ‘transference': Coral awakens from a swoon to see the
physician's face, and imagines for an instant that it is she who
is ministering to him:

Her piercing insight is no delusion. It is registered also,
but with much more cynicism, by the hard-bitten yellowpress
reporter Mabel Warren, who knows for a fact that Dr.
Czinner needs help but is prepared to throw him to the wolves
for a good story. How perfectly Greene catches the ingratiating
tone of the desperate journalist: ‘Her voice was low,
almost tender; she might have been urging a loved dog
towards a lethal chamber.'

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. The bitter controversy
over anti-Semitism touches an extraordinary number of the
novels, poems, and essays written during the 1920s and 1930s
(it continues to inflect all discussion of Greene's early hero
John Buchan, for example, but it extends through Ezra Pound,
T.S. Eliot, and even Thomas Mann). And
Stamboul Train
was
written just as the Nazi Party was preparing to take power.
So one ought not to postpone a confrontation with the question.
Michael Shelden, Graham Greene's biographer, states
roundly that Myatt is a deliberately ugly caricature of
Jewishness, and that this conforms to other bigoted opinions
expressed by Greene in his film reviews. In reply, the novelist
David Lodge has argued that Greene disliked the vulgarity of
Hollywood, and that it was difficult for him not to mention
the preponderance of Jewish executives in this milieu. (‘The
dark alien executive tipping his cigar ash behind the glass partition
. . .' as Greene phrased it in the London
Spectator
as late
as 1937.) As for Myatt, Lodge maintains that he is represented
as a Good Samaritan rather than a Shylock or a Fagin. (I am
paraphrasing his point of view without, I hope, misrepresenting
it.)