While visiting the Orient Express exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe last week, I posted an Instagram photo of a table in the dining car. On the table there was a typewriter, a glass of champagne and an ashtray. Although I was in a real Orient Express carriage - parked outside the institute -, the table was a reconstruction: an imagined version of the writer Graham Greene's table on the train many years ago. But it was obvious from the "likes" and comments that my followers thought I really was on the Orient Express, working on my next book.
If only. The Orient Express long ago ceased to be a real train. It is a concept, a daydream, a myth. And perhaps it always was. When people boarded the train in its heyday - roughly between 1900 and 1939 - they were not travelling to Istanbul, but to an imagined version of the Orient. A blend of ideas that combined the weight of history, the exoticism of minarets and the eroticism of the harem. The characters in Graham Greene's "Orient Express" find themselves in a dusty and depressing Istanbul. And by far the best part of Sidney Lumet's film version of "Murder on the Orient Express" is the beginning. The suspects hurry aboard, the whistle blows, and the great locomotive pulls away, at first slowly, then faster, music flowing alongside it like a ribbon of steam. The romance of travel, as always, lies in the anticipation.
