It's never just 'an entertainment' when Graham Greene has written it. This novel about strangers on a train tries to cover a lot of ground about relationships and fate. His characters are very fleshed out, even if some of the plot is a little specious or a major character is simply an anti-semitic stereotype. Carleton Myatt, a Jewish merchant, makes one think that Greene had not ever met a Jew. He is totally unrealistic and rather offensive, not out of particular venom (I think Greene tries to be sympathetic to Myatt) but out of a routine anti-semitism of the age.