TRAIN TIME

 

That year, 1931, 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.

So recalled the English author Graham Greene. The book, which he self-consciously titled "An Entertainment", was published in 1932 as Stamboul Train (in the UK) and Orient Express (in the US).

The overnight-train theme was apparently popular in the Interwar Years. Greene admits that "before I completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express (1932), the English had made Rome Express (1932), and even the Russians had produced their railway film Turksib". Agatha Christie's book Murder on the Orient Express (UK) and Murder in the Calais Coach (US) followed in 1934. 

 While both the books, Stamboul Train and Murder on the Orient Express, concern journeys on the express train service between Paris and Istanbul, they are very different in style. Greene's story is the most interesting. Even though its author thought of it as only "An Entertainment", composed solely for money, he couldn't help himself but write observantly and well. For example, his description of the novel's setting is through the sensations of train travel:

      "The darkness fell outside, and passengers through the glass could see only the transparent reflection of their own features...

       Out in the dark nothing was visible, except for the occasional flash of lights from a small station, the rush of flame in a tunnel, and always the transparent likeness of his face, his hands floating like a fish through which water and weeds shine...

       His face for a moment disappeared from view as the lights of a station turned the walls on the coach from mirrors to windows, through which become visible a throng of country passengers waiting with children and packages and string-bags for some slow cross-country train".

Christie's approach to the setting is more obvious, as if her readers need to be told (in words of few syllables) precisely why her characters are on the train:

      "Ah!" he sighed...All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days they part, they go their several ways, never perhaps to see each other again".

      "And yet", said Poirot, "suppose an accident...perhaps all here are linked together ― by death".

Christie's characters are, similarly, clumsily drawn:

      Hercule Poirot was a moment in replying.

      "When he passed me in the restaurant", he said at last, "I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal ― an animal savage. but savage! you understand ― had passed me by".

      "And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable".

      "Prècisèment! The body ― the cage ― is everything of the most acceptable ― but through the bars, the wild animal looks out".

      "You are fanciful, mon vieux", said M. Bouc.

      "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close".

This is a very heavy-handed hint, wanting only surrounding flashing lights to spell CLUE. But it is perhaps unfair to subject Christie's murder mysteries to criticism. She wrote for a particular audience. Over decades of popularity she developed a large and loyal following. 

These readers expected to be pleasantly (and predictably) diverted by a puzzle, a guessing game. They looked forward to getting stuck into 'a good murder'. Their challenge was to 'solve the case' before Miss Marple or Hercules Poirot, to pick the right clues out of a maze of false ones. It was a contest that Agatha always won, further enhancing her reputation as 'a good author'.

In her chosen space, Christie is an acknowledged champion, but this means that she is forever 'telling' the reader things rather than 'showing' them through her story. Reading Murder on the Orient Express is a little like sitting in a hotel lobby or waiting room and assessing the parade of passers-by according to their outward appearance and mannerisms. 'People-watching' is fun for a while, but ultimately superficial.

Contrast this with Greene's thriller Stamboul Train. One of his main characters is Myatt, an opportunistic young businessman with the added misfortune of being a Jew in a virulently anti-Semitic age.

      "Now as she watched him and he became aware of her, she saw his hands go out in a gesture which stayed halfway; she knew it was a trick of his race which he was consciously repressing...He smiled and was unable to resist a spread of the hands, a slight bow from the hips. "Pardon me..."

       "She watched him with interest, trying to find a stranger behind the too familiar features, the small eyes, the large nose, the black oiled hair. She had seen this man too often, like a waiter in a dinner jacket sitting in the front row at provincial theatres, behind a desk at agent's offices, in the wings at rehearsal, outside the stage door at midnight..."

Coreal Musker is a thin, unemployed chorus girl traveling towards an uncertain future. She recognizes the racial stereotype and is suspicious. However she realises she doesn't need to reject Myatt according to common prejudice.

He has been kind to her, giving up his first class berth so she can sleep unmolested and in comfort, while he spent the night outside in the cold corridor to ensure she was not troubled further. He is her rescuer and she is simply grateful.

This is an example of courageous writing. Greene tackles a contentious issue, not in a polemical way, but through the experiences of ordinary people. It is a convincing portrait of practical accommodation by 'commoners', without recourse to slogans. It's far from perfect but its the best that can be achieved by characters who otherwise have little control over their circumstances.  

* * *

A major appeal of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is its 'escapism'. Readers actually living in troubling times probably did not enjoy the reproduction of social unrest in their fiction. They might quite reasonably have resented it as an invasion of their precious leisure time. Awareness of the world outside the railway carriage is therefore limited to a brief mention of topics discussed by an English colonel (anti-colonial unrest and British India) and an American citizen (Prohibition and the Wall Street Crash). Headlines only, not the details, thank you very much.

Reality, beyond the confines of the speeding Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lites, was certainly grim. In 1931 when Greene was writing Stamboul Train, a virtual whirlwind of political and economic crisis  prevailed. In Britain, the year was bookended by two dreadful coal mine disasters (27 killed at Haig Pit in Cumberland 29 January; 45 fatalities at Bentley Colliery in South Yorkshire, 30 November).

Midyear saw the collapse of the Ramsay MacDonald Labour Party Government and the bitter disillusion of parliamentary 'gradualism' (democratic socialism) for millions of working class Britons. Under the new National Government, widespread joblessness and industry closures were answered by government salary cuts and reduction of unemployment benefits. The country was polarised between 'the haves', who were terrified of losing whatever they had, and 'the have-nots', who were already desperate.

In Europe, the continent through which the Orient Express passed, the situation was even more precarious. In May the Creditanstaltd, Austria's largest bank, went bankrupt, beginning a chain of bank closures throughout Central Europe. In June German Chancellor Brüning went to London to warn the British Prime Minister that his country's entire banking system was at the point of failure. Deposits withdrawn from the Reichsbank that month had been 150 million marks in the first week, 540 million marks in the second week, and 150 million over the next two days. Despite American President Hoover and the Bank of England stepping in with some emergency funding, and the Allied powers agreeing to suspend Germany's compulsory war reparation payments for six months, the juggernaut of Depression ploughed on. Commercial defaults, now commonplace in Germany, spread out into Hungary and Romania.

Rather than ignore the external tensions of uncertainty and insecurity, Greene takes his readers right into it. The author's example of social disintegration is Jugoslavia, an uncomfortable conglomeration of disparate Balkan ethnicities that fell out of the bottom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War One. 

Greene's narrative route is via the mind of anguished passenger and returning revolutionary Dr Czinner, aka Dr John. Czinner's journey back to the country that will kill him is an immersive experience. The reader shares his dread, and the corrupt police and silent,  starving peasants at Subotica border-crossing do not disappoint. Czinner is a doomed character and we are drawn into the darkness with him.

Welcome to "Greeneland"! This novel is not one of the well known post-war titles that Greene is famous for (of which one critic wrote "No European writer since Conrad has put the hot, poor and foully governed places of the earth on paper as vividly as Greene"), but it serves as a good introduction. The basic elements are here, in the moral ambiguity of his honest, dispassionate 'reporting'. 

In early Greene, as in later Greene, compassion for life's victims is joined by the self-knowledge that he has no solutions for the social problems that threaten to overwhelm them. His refusal to align himself with the alluring promises of party politics or religion has the great advantage of truthfulness. Literary critic Donat O'Donnell (writing in 1947) believed that, "far more than the left-wing militancy of such poets as Auden and Spender...the thrillers of Mr Greene reflect the state of the West European mind in the thirties..." 

In an interview with Marie-Françoise Allain given in 1983, Graham Greene said he hadn't wanted to use literature for propogandist purposes.

I don't fight injustice: I express a sense of injustice, for my aim is not to change things but to give them expression.

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REFERENCES:

Graham Greene, 1932, Stamboul Train, <archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458557>

Agatha Christie, 1934, Murder on the Orient Express, <detective.gumer.info/anto/christie_8_2.pdf>

Brian Diemert, 1996, in Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s, McGill-Queens Press

John Spurling, 1983, in Graham Greene, Methuen, London

Andrew Gasiorek, 'Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene', in British Fiction after Modernism

Christopher Higgins, 'Introduction' to Greene's Stamboul Train: An Entertainment

Wikipedia, 'England in 1931' and 'MCMXXXI'