Orient Express by Graham Greene

Because his future had an almost certain limit, he began to dwell, as he was not accustomed to do, on the past. There had been a time when a clear conscience could be bought at the price of a moment's shame "since my last confession I have done this or that." If, he thought with longing and a little bitterness, I could get back my purity of motive so easily, I should be a fool not to take the chance of forgiveness; I have no conviction that there is anyone to forgive. He came near to sneering at his last belief: Shall I go and confess my sins to the treasurer of the Social-Democratic party, to the third-class passengers? 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.

Orient Express was Graham Greene's first big success, a popular novel about political intrigue on the famed train running from Ostend to Istanbul. Funny, though, how its success must have been dwarfed by Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, which came out two years later and at the same time as the film adaptation of Greene's novel. Greene originally titled his book Stamboul Train; I'm not sure about the timing but it's hard not to wonder if the filmmakers, and those who subsequently titled the novel's American edition, were hoping to piggyback off Christie's success. A comparison between the two might be instructive: though Greene considered Orient Express an "entertainment," without the weightiness of some of his later, more serious novels, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that it is quite as "entertaining" as Christie. There's murder and bloodshed on this train, but they don't quite lend themselves to the cathartic crime-and-solution two-step of a satisfying mystery novel. In Greene's version, only a few--and not necessarily the reader--are privileged enough to arrive at their intended destination.

As you might expect, Orient Express is about people from all walks of life, gathered on a train. There's Carleton Myatt, a Jewish businessman, dealing in currants, who is preoccupied with the possibility that he is being cheated by his agent in Istanbul. There's Coral Musker, who is traveling to Istanbul to join a chorus line; Myatt gifts her his own first-class berth when she faints suddenly in the corridor. There's Josef Grunlich, who has just shot and killed a man during a robbery when he boards in secret at Vienna--one of the sensible things about the way Greene structures the novel is that people are always getting on and off the train, you know, as people do, instead of being "stuck" on it in the classic mystery setup. There's Dr. Richard John, who is really a Serbian Communist named Dr. Richard Czinner, who is headed secretly back to Belgrade to stand trial for a past attempt at revolution. Czinner's return is spoiled by a journalist named Mabel Warren, a really ugly sort of character: not only are her journalistic methods unscrupulous, but she's also a drunk and a predatory lesbian who's enraged by the desertion of her beautiful "partner." (This character is not Greene's finest moment, I think.)

"Entertainment" or not, the politics of Orient Express are subtly radical. Czinner forms the novel's moral spine: he knows he is returning to face certain death in Belgrade, and his thoughts are the thoughts of a dying man, reckoning up the sum of his successes and failures. Czinner's revolution has been twice scuttled, but he goes to affirming his own convictions by suffering at the hand of the despised state. It's Czinner, too, who occupies the role of the lapsed Catholic that appears in nearly all of Greene's novels. Greene writes that Czinner had "blown that candle out with his own breath, telling himself that God was a fiction invented by the rich to keep the poor content," but when faced with failure and death, he longs for the return of a belief that will shape his sacrifice into a meaning that still eludes it.

It's Myatt who is Czinner's foil: although he is dogged throughout the novel by casual anti-Semitism, Myatt's life is organized around capital. He gives his bunk, and eventually his first-class ticket, to Coral, who is inwardly ravaged by the question of what she owes him in return. Myatt and Coral seem to genuinely like each other, but their budding relationship is troubled by Myatt's gift. When Coral says "I love you," after giving herself--and her virginity!--to Myatt, how much of that is genuine love, and how much is predicated on his promise to give her a place to live in Istanbul? She doesn't know, and neither does Myatt: capital and capitalism, Greene suggests, present an insurmountable barrier to human connection.

I've never read Murder on the Orient Express. I assume Christie, for the sake of narrative unity, keeps the action pretty focused on the train itself, and doesn't let anyone off. But the climax of Orient Express comes in the Serbian border town of Subotica, where military officials--thanks to Mabel's morning article, which reaches Belgrade before the train can--have orders to seize Czinner. Their dragnet scrapes up Josef and Coral, too, separating her from Myatt, and providing the dramatic setup for the novel's final push. Coral gets an opportunity to absorb Czinner's moral clarity, freed from the complications of capital; Myatt gets a chance--though not necessarily a successful one--to perform an act of heroism that will be a gift to Coral of more than monetary value.

It's clear to me that Greene's work got better than age, and if anything, even more cynical about the operations of European capitalism and imperialism. Czinner stands out as a character here, but stands out also as a prototype for more interesting and complicated apostates, fewer good men trying to understand their own goodness and more bad men who do good things despite all their best efforts. Still, Orient Express is a much deeper and more thoughtful book than Greene seemed to believe it was.