Stamboul Train - Graham Greene

I suspect this to be the tenth "Greene" book I've read to date; I am wont to do so when the work pressure reaches high, and nothing more than an "entertainment" ( Greene's label ; not mine ),  is all my tired limited faculties can endure. So in this instance it was a trip on the Stamboul Train, a train  which ran from Ostend, Belgium to Istanbul, Turkey.Although it had changed its route and destination over time, The Orient Express, functioned till December 2009.  In fact when this book was published in the U.S. it was re-titled the Orient Express. It was the first successful book by Graham Greene ( he disowned two books he wrote previously, and this first came out first in as early as 1932. The print I have is the first Penguin edition released in 1963, a copy of which I picked up from the Senanayaka Book Shop, Wellawatta.OF the book, Geene famously said:

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.

It is the assorted characters who find themselves in the train that makes this is a thrilling read. A failed Revolutionary Communist,  a drunken lesbian journalist, her companion Janet who plans to break away from her companion's clutches, a succesful Jew currant tradesman, a burglar who ends up a murderer and a poor chorus girl hoping to make a career as a dancer and a popular novelist. It  is important to note that Greene brought up the subject of lesbianism in 1932, round about the same time that  Forster was indecisive as to release his novel, Maurice. In Maurice, the main character was gay - it was revised in 1932 ( originally written in 1913-1914) and then  in 1959-60, before being published posthumously, in 1971, and more close associations to the characters in the novel may have made Forster hesitant. Besides, the subject is secondary to the main narration, although it most certainly contributes.

Although termed an Entertainment, true to form, Greene's such works are interspersed with serious issues. Anti-semitism as it was in the late twenties and early thirties is one of the main subjects. The Jew Currant Trader is one of the key characters here.

Few of the worthy extracts, the first that of  Mabel Warran the journalist is as follows:

"And at Vienna she was losing Janet Pardoe, who was going alone 
into a world where men ruled They would flatter her and give her bright 
cheap objects, as though she were a native to be cheated with Wool worth 
mirrors and glass beads But it was not their enjoyment she most feared, it 
was Janet’s. Not loving her at all, or only for the hour, the day, the year, they 
could make her weak with pleasure, cry aloud in her enjoyment. While she, 
Mabel Warren, who had saved her from a governess’s buried life and fed her 
and clothed her, who could love her with the same passion until death, 
without satiety, had no means save her lips to express her love, was faced 
always by the fact that she gave no enjoyment and gained herself no more 
than an embittered sense of insufficiency Now with her head aching, the 
smell of gm in her nostrils, the knowledge of her flushed ugliness, she hated 
men with a wicked intensity and their bright spurious graces." 

Then the failed revolutionary Communist  Dr. Czinner recalls thus:

"Nothing in her experience would have enabled her to realise the extent of the 
loneliness to which she had abandoned him. ‘I have only one work.’ It was a 
confession which frightened him, for it had not been always true. He had not 
lived beside and grown accustomed to the idea of a unique employment His 
life had once been lit by the multitude of his duties. If he had been born with 
a spirit like a vast bare room, covered with the signs of a house gone down in 
the world, scratches and peeling paper and dust, his duties, like the separate 
illuminations of a great candelabra too massive to pawn, had adequately lit 
it. There had been his duty to his parents who had gone hungry that he 
might be educated. He remembered the day when he took his degree, and 
how they had visited him in his bed-sitting-room and sat quiet in a corner 
watching him with respect, even with awe, and without love, for they could 
not love him now that he was an educated man, once he heard his father 
address him as 4 Sir’. Those candles had blown out early, and he had hardly 
noticed the loss of two lights among so many, for he had his duty to his 
patients, his duty to the poor of Belgrade, and the slowly growing idea of his 
duty to his own class in every country His parents had starved themselves 
that he might be a doctor, he himself had gone hungry and endangered his 
health that he might be a doctor, and it was only when he had practised for 
several years that he realised the uselessness of his skill He could do nothing 
for his own people, he could not recommend rest to the worn-out or prescribe 
insulin to the diabetic, because they had not the money to pay for either"

The novel ends in a despairing note. A murderer gets away. A cheat makes a deal. A girl looking for fidelity is denied it by cruel circumstances. And the man who has spent his life for a cause dies in a cold store room. It is as if very early in his career, Greene wants to register to his readers that life is never fair. 

A most entertaining book, with a fine balance of - well, entertainment, insight in to life and of an era that was.