Travels with My Aunt: 4

Primality know for his somber novels of great moral dilemmas usually in developing world setting, "Travels with My Aunt" is something of a departure for the great Graham Greene. With its often absurdly situations this is a deeply comic novel rich in humor. The story centers on Henry Pulling, a recently retired banker. He is stuffy, unimaginative, and not one prone to fun. Shortly after he meets his eccentric aunt, who he has not seen since he was a young child, he ends up on whirlwind travels that are best left for the reader to discover for his or herself. Suffice to say, however, the novel is very funny and the new world the travels open up to Pulling are only one part of the fun. Certaily not one of Greene's deeper works, but definetly one of his more entertaining ones. Enjoy.

Mr Greene's novel is the story of Henry Pulling, a 50 year old retired bank manager who lives a quiet life in Southwood, passionately looking after his dahlias. Henry meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She quickly persuades him to abandon his monotonous suburban life to join her and travel her way. And so they make their way first to Brighton and later to Paris, Istanbul and Paraguay. Through her aunt Henry gets acquainted with a twilight society, hippies, war criminals and CIA agents. He learns to smoke pot and to smuggle large amounts of money from one country to the next. The character of Aunt Augusta is very witty indeed: she is wicked, selfish, wildly engaging, an old "belle de nuit" who likes men "who have a bit of the hound in them", a quality her nephew obviously lacks, which adds to her bewilderment. It is a feminine character, Aunt Augusta, who takes charge of the story, a rare fact for Mr Greene. She becomes a fierce, bossy and intrusive mother figure for Henry. Indeed he ends up by understanding and calling her "mother" a few lines before the end of the novel as he lays his head on his aunt's breast, feeling like a boy again who has run away from school and will never have to return. Finally Henry is completely transformed by his aunt and, at 50, begins to blossom. He sees her differently and acknowledges that she is not as wicked as he first considered her. In a prison cell in Paraguay, Henry notes: "I would certainly have called her career shady myself nine months ago and yet now there seemed nothing so very wrong in her curriculum vitae, nothing as wrong as 30 years in a bank."

If you want to re-experience the joy of reading that you had as a child--when you couldn't put a book down, when you carried characters with you from day to day--this is one to read. It is about life and second chances and is an antidote to the rather 1984-ish world we are living in today: you experience that boundless life can never really be contained, nor a human life ever really circumscribed. I don't agree that it has "no plot," it moves right along from experience to experience, event to event. It far surpasses most contemporary novels because Greene is a master of voice, tone, pacing and he knows a thing or two about the human character as well. It is at once laugh out loud funny, poignant, and extremely wise. I think it summarizes Greene's worldview quite nicely.

Originally published in 1969, Penguin Classics recently published a centenial edition of Graham Greene's classic, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Greene's entertaining novel follows Henry Pulling, a retired London bank manager, on his travels with his seventy-five year old Aunt Augusta, two of the most memorable characters in twentieth-century literature. Henry is a middle-aged bachelor-nerd, who reads Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott, while cultivating dahlias for entertainment. Aunt Augusta, by contrast, is a wild, old belle de nuit, who has literally been around the world a time or two. Upon the death of Henry's eighty-six year old mother, Aunt Augusta pulls Henry from his mundane existence into her bizarre world of smuggling, smoking pot, hippies, war criminals, CIA operatives, and South American dictatorships. While travelling the world together, they encounter other memorable characters like Wordsworth, a dope smuggler with an affection for Aunt Augusta ("She war my bebi gel," he says; "now she gon bust ma heart in bits" p. 201), and a groovy hippie-girl named Tooley, who turns Henry on to some "very mild" cigarettes she got in Paris. By the end of the novel, Henry becomes addicted to his new life of adventure, and even makes a surprising discovery about his "aunt" Augusta. (Readers won't be as surprised.) In the carpe diem genre of literature, Greene's message in this delightful novel is to live life to its fullest before it's too late. G. Merritt