Although Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists, Orient Express is so far my least favorite novel of is. As an "entertainment" with a similar title as one of Agatha Christie's classics, I expected something more exciting, granted there are some moments which are written as action film scenes. But I suppose my major problem with the novel is the caricatured main characters and the pervasive anti-Semitism where one is not sure if the author agrees.
The middle-aged lesbian who hates men, the virgin chorus girl, the self-conscious Jew, the thief on the run, and the novelist, Savory, are not as interesting as one would like, in spite of the "exotic" settings on a train bound for Istanbul. However, where the novel does approach the more typical 'Catholic' Greene territory, is in the lapsed Catholic Communist, Dr. Czinner (the name is a clue), who seeks redemption after the failure of an attempted Communist uprising.
His character and his end, in his search for redemption, bring to mind a point made by a favorite intellectual historian of mine about the similarities between Marxism and Christianity. Furthermore, as Christiopher Hitchens's introduction to the edition I read indicates, Greene was likely drawing on his own sympathies for the Left and Catholicism in the character of Czinner, juxtaposing his fate with the ongoing social inequalities and exploitation of interwar Europe.
In that sense, the train, with its various classed cars and compartments, and the numerous references to the peasants, soldiers, clerks, and porters at the various sites along the way, is a portrait of the world in all its vicious social inequities, the passengers forced to engage with those in a setting in which the class, gender, sexual, and national borders are in flux. As one might expect, it doesn't end well for Czinner, Coral's fate is uncertain, but there are glimpses into which the characters' intersecting lives have unforgettably changed each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment