An Entertainment
And entertainments
Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
Films set on trains are a rarity now but they used to be all the rage. Think of The Lady Vanishes with a chase through a train’s forbidding luggage van stuffed with magic props, its climactic scenes of a shooting gallery in and around a stalled dining car and an engine. Think of North by Northwest, with our poor Roger Thornhill, on the run and hidden inside a fold-up bed like a tinned sardine. Think, indeed, of Terror by Night, a fine if unremembered Sherlock Holmes adventure starring Rathbone and Bruce, with a body found in one compartment, a series of untrustworthy characters in the rest, and a trout-like dowager’s emerald gone missing.
This is a known genre. People know what it is and what it means. They might think themselves above it: above Murder on the Orient Express (book and films), above the whole thing. But there are still some depths to visit, some lessons to learn. And Greene’s book, his first of any note (although there are things to be said for The Man Within), possesses some of those depths.
Greene writes in a style that is – and more than one person has told me this – both moralising and modern. Modern, because he is – no matter what happens and to whom, no matter what names and places he uses – very straightforward, almost geographic in his clarity – like a well-blocked movie scene. Not straightforward in all things. But in terms of action. We know who is doing what to whom, and how those characters that Greene’s narrator gives an inner life are meant to feel about it. But moralising, too, because Greene cannot leave well enough alone.
Take Pinkie in Brighton Rock. We can understand this gangster’s bitterness; we can understand his tortured misery. But what we sometimes cannot abide is the preaching – not by him so much as through him. A constant tide of moral judgement, the author desperate to tell us what we already think: that this man is evil and will, if there is a hereafter, burn for eternity. It’s all made very clear. And yet for Greene, a kind of elegant, implied, structural clarity is never quite enough.
As his characters are led, metaphorically, to the gallows erected by their own choices, they cogitate a little too much. They think about their fates and their decisions. Those of us who have met real criminals, or have read a lot about them, or have met other people who have worked with or against many of that type, we know that people like that are famous for not thinking. They do in large part because they do not think. In Greene’s world, however, the thoughtless criminal is quite rare. They may not have self-awareness. Let’s not grant them that. But they do think a little about what it is they do all day, and the worry pours out of them like sweat off a marathon runner.
But for the moment, ladies and gentlemen, Stamboul Train.
As I have before, I’m going to skirt around the plot because you would not believe how upset people are – quite justly – at hearing someone talk positively about a book but leave them no reason, afterwards, to read it. So let us take a little turn around the subject, spilling few secrets. Doing no one any harm.
There is a certain amount of exoticism to hurtling through central and eastern Europe, bound to the great terminus of Constantinople, in the first half of the last century. On either side, country filled by people whom you will never meet, whom you could not speak to if you broke down, who you might even see through the windows but with whom your life will never overlap. There’s a cheap form of poetry to it; and for melancholic souls staring out of misted up train windows, there is tragic poetry behind the cheap poetry.
And on the train itself – some great personalities, some personal crises, some great and terrible things. Now, the people on the train, they have lives – lives that are immense and lives that are so trivial, so overlooked, it almost hurts the reader to think about them. They have their share of problems, of course. The wife does not love them; the girlfriend is distant; they have not eaten for some time – and the eyes begin to waver, the abdomen begins to ache and the pulse to race, and then, quite overcome, one gets light-headed, light-headed and weak and needs to sit down. Is helped to lie down by gentle, caring hands.
On this train, as on other trains, are both youth and bitter experience. The young want what the old have but without the wait. The old envy the young, cannot express that envy except in regret, or bitterness, or a snarl. And more than one of the young, and more than one of the old, have some secrets they wish to conceal.
I will not tell you – I promised I would not – what those secrets are. Who is hiding what, and from whom. And who is running away, as fast as steam can take them, faster than hope – further, they beg, than notoriety can reach. I promised I would not tell.