by Pa Rock
Reader
I first became familiar with the writing of novelist Graham Greene rather late in life when a street vendor in Old Hanoi sold me a copy of The Quiet American, a tale of American spies and their schemes to influence geo-politics in the lead-up to the U.S. entry into the Vietnamese civil war. Most of the action in that novel took place in and around colonial Saigon.
In Greene's novel, Orient Express, the action, like the train in the title, travels across Central Europe during a few wintry days in the early 1930's. A group of disparate passengers board the famous train in Paris. They are headed to various destinations in Germany, Austria, and the Balkans, and some are riding on to the train's final destination in Istanbul. As the Orient Express chugs onward and the winter snows increase, the lives of the passengers slowly start to become entwined. Histories are given, plots revealed, and relationships are altered.
Myatt, a Jewish businessman, is heading to Istanbul to complete an important merger. He meets Coral, a young dancer who is traveling in a crowded economy coach and has become ill. Myatt gallantly gives her his private compartment and then spends the night sleeping in a corridor. The next night they share Myatt's compartment where Coral, who is not all that young, loses her virginity. The following day she disappears from the train along with a doctor who is returning to his home in the Balkans to lead a communist uprising - and another man who committed a murder the previous day and then sneaked aboard the training an effort to escape.
There is also a drunken, lesbian newspaper reporter who hopped aboard in Paris at the last possible moment when she recognized the Communist doctor getting on the train. The reporter's girlfriend, who appears to be fleeing the relationship, is also on the train heading to Istanbul. And there are some other persons of interest as well on the Orient Express.
Much of the criticism directed toward this book is that the author tended to flit between situations too frequently and did not spend adequate time delving into the personalities and motivations of his characters. To me that seemed to have been intentional. The characters, like true passengers on a train, caught glimpses of each other and heard snatches of conversation, but they were usually not in positions to interact on an in-depth basis. And when they did hook-up with one another, stories and lives changed.
The book, like the train, began one place and ended in quite another. The lives of the characters were revealed and shuffled along the way. Some completed their journeys exactly as they had planned, others saw changes in their circumstances that would follow them throughout their lives - and a couple were rerouted onto completely new paths.
Graham Greene's excursion on the Orient Express was an eventful journey, one that I enjoyed sharing. Through his skilled writing I felt the train cars gently rocking and watched in rapt attention at lives fell apart and then regrouped, often in surprising ways. Mr. Greene took an ordinary train ride across the wintry landscape of Central Europe and made it memorable.
Reader
I first became familiar with the writing of novelist Graham Greene rather late in life when a street vendor in Old Hanoi sold me a copy of The Quiet American, a tale of American spies and their schemes to influence geo-politics in the lead-up to the U.S. entry into the Vietnamese civil war. Most of the action in that novel took place in and around colonial Saigon.
In Greene's novel, Orient Express, the action, like the train in the title, travels across Central Europe during a few wintry days in the early 1930's. A group of disparate passengers board the famous train in Paris. They are headed to various destinations in Germany, Austria, and the Balkans, and some are riding on to the train's final destination in Istanbul. As the Orient Express chugs onward and the winter snows increase, the lives of the passengers slowly start to become entwined. Histories are given, plots revealed, and relationships are altered.
Myatt, a Jewish businessman, is heading to Istanbul to complete an important merger. He meets Coral, a young dancer who is traveling in a crowded economy coach and has become ill. Myatt gallantly gives her his private compartment and then spends the night sleeping in a corridor. The next night they share Myatt's compartment where Coral, who is not all that young, loses her virginity. The following day she disappears from the train along with a doctor who is returning to his home in the Balkans to lead a communist uprising - and another man who committed a murder the previous day and then sneaked aboard the training an effort to escape.
There is also a drunken, lesbian newspaper reporter who hopped aboard in Paris at the last possible moment when she recognized the Communist doctor getting on the train. The reporter's girlfriend, who appears to be fleeing the relationship, is also on the train heading to Istanbul. And there are some other persons of interest as well on the Orient Express.
Much of the criticism directed toward this book is that the author tended to flit between situations too frequently and did not spend adequate time delving into the personalities and motivations of his characters. To me that seemed to have been intentional. The characters, like true passengers on a train, caught glimpses of each other and heard snatches of conversation, but they were usually not in positions to interact on an in-depth basis. And when they did hook-up with one another, stories and lives changed.
The book, like the train, began one place and ended in quite another. The lives of the characters were revealed and shuffled along the way. Some completed their journeys exactly as they had planned, others saw changes in their circumstances that would follow them throughout their lives - and a couple were rerouted onto completely new paths.
Graham Greene's excursion on the Orient Express was an eventful journey, one that I enjoyed sharing. Through his skilled writing I felt the train cars gently rocking and watched in rapt attention at lives fell apart and then regrouped, often in surprising ways. Mr. Greene took an ordinary train ride across the wintry landscape of Central Europe and made it memorable.
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