Orient Express, by Graham Greene

The cover of this book is so pretty! And the pages have rough jagged edges. That is reason enough to read this.

Published in 1933, this is the first and last time Greene "set out deliberately to write a book to please". And it is quite a pleasing novel. All the action happens on a train rushing towards Constaninople:

In the rushing reverberating express, noise was so regular that it was the equivalent of silence, movement was so continuous that after a while the mind accepted it as stillness. Only outside the train was violence of action possible, and the train would contain him safely with his plans for three days...

The novel is full of such lovely detail and description. The characters are distinct and well-formed for a short novel; the plot substantial.

While pleasing, Orient Express isn't frivolous. It is about class, race, and political differences: yet it is never didactic or forlorn. It simply describes. Greene describes a self-conscious and rich Jew in this novel: it is troubling to read of the safety this Jew felt in Western Europe and to think that this was written in 1931, just a few years before the horrors of the Holocaust. Chilling.