Graham Greene, born in Hertfordshire in 1904, was a shy and
sensitive boy who disliked sports. Harassed as the son of the
headmaster, he skipped school to read adventure stories, and
was treated by an analyst at the age of 15 after several
suicide attempts.
Although he described his experience at Balliol College as
drunken and debt-ridden, it was here that he gained his first
writing experience on the school paper. He graduated in 1925
and took a job at a paper in Nottingham.He converted to
Catholicism in 1926, saying that he needed a religion to
"measure my evil against." In 1927 he married and took a job
in London with The Times. He found literary success with his
second novel, THE MAN WITHIN. He quit his job and wrote two
more novels, both failures. In dire economic straits, he took
on his next novel with the sole motive of it being a
crowd-pleaser. Published in 1932, STAMBOUL EXPRESS (ORIENT
EXPRESS) was exactly this.
For many years Greene traveled as a reporter and
correspondent, and many of his novels are based on his
travels. His JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS is based on a 400 mile trek
through the jungles of Liberia. He had a particular weakness
for the hot spots of political and religious turbulence. He
traveled to Mexico in 1938 during the religious purges, and
turned the experience into one of his best known novels, THE
POWER AND THE GLORY. He spent time in Saigon in 1955, a few
years before the Vietnam war began, and produced THE QUIET
AMERICAN, an anti-American novel that made him popular in
Russia. In the last days of pre-Castro Cuba Greene met
Hemingway in Havana in 1958, and visited him at his house.
From this experience came OUR MAN IN HAVANA. Greene died in
1991.
Greene's ORIENT EXPRESS follows the legendary train and a
group of travelers on their eastern journey towards
Constantinople. Political intrigue, love, and sex combine to
interweave the travelers' fates. There's a washed-up old
Communist revolutionary, a thief turned murderer, a Jewish
businessman, a chorus girl, and a couple lesbians thrown in
for good measure. A sad and ironic drama unfolds as the train
speeds east.
Many of Greene's novels examined religious themes in a
political setting. A common plot is a failed man looking to
right matters and, failing again, Greene measures this in a
religious light, ruminating on fallen grace and God's mercy.
Greene's Catholicism is not a tool for the righteous, but
rather a creed for the desperate.
True to form, ORIENT EXPRESS involves a confused and
burnt-out former Communist revolutionary on his way back
home. Unfortunately, this man's affairs are not particularly
interesting, and Greene's attempt to bond together a cohesive
story out of a disparate band of travelers never fully
succeeds. However, Greene does a fine job of portraying most
of the characters, and there are moments of excellence in his
writing. A serious flaw in the novel is his constant
stereotyping of Myatt, the Jew. Although Greene was accused
of anti-Semitism by biographer Michael Sheldon, in fairness,
it should be noted that Greene was invited to Israel in 1967
and awarded the Jerusalem prize.
miker
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