5 Responses to “Travels with My Aunt”

1. 
   darragh o'donoghue
   Oct 21st, 2010 at 3:20 am

   ‘Travels’ is not a great novel, not even a great Graham Greene novel. It is flawed, mannered, contrived, old-fashioned, complacent; the work of a writer who has earned his laurels and is content to lounge on them. The frequent allusions to then-modish Latin American fiction (the novel ends up in Paraguay) only exposes its lack of adventurousness. Sometimes you wonder whether the maddening primness is the narrator’s or the author’s. Too often, Greene resorts to caricature rather than character, and even the splendid figure of Aunt Augusta feels like a writerly short-cut.

   But.

   ‘Travels’ is one of the most purely pleasurable books I have ever read, largely due to the perfectly captured narrative voice, a middle-aged virgin, retired bank manager and dahlia expert unwittingly thrown into a world of smuggling, soft drugs, hippies, war criminals, CIA operatives, military dictatorships, and whose decent, limited tolerance keeps the fantastic narrative believable, but also blinds him to genuine horrors.

   The book contains some of Greene’s funniest writing; if he’d written it 30 years earlier he’s have called it an ‘entertainment’, those more generic or populist works that weren’t overtly concerned with great moral themes. Today, these entertainments seem to have dated better than the ‘serious’ books.

   Of course, 30 years on and Greene can relax his style – the plot is less vice-like, the words don’t imprison – rather, they eloquently express a developing consciousness and sensibility. This is a story that proliferates with stories, some comic, some tragic, some parable-lie, all leading inexorably towards one untold story. Like all Greene’s novels, ‘Travels’ concerns modern man’s search for home, and the ending is devastating, mixing imagistic beauty with characteristically flat cynicism.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. 
   HORAK
   Oct 21st, 2010 at 4:22 am

   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.”
   Rating: 5 / 5

3. 
   G. Merritt
   Oct 21st, 2010 at 6:49 am

   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
   Rating: 5 / 5

4. 
   English Teacher
   Oct 21st, 2010 at 8:00 am

   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.
   Rating: 5 / 5

5. 
   A. Ross
   Oct 21st, 2010 at 10:36 am

   Finally, a Graham Greene book I sort of liked (following disappointing experiences with Stamboul Train and This Gun For Hire)! That said, it’s not great stuff, but it’s at least fairly entertaining, diverting, and sad. The tale is of Henry, a middle-aged bachelor (and presumably virgin) who has been forced to retire from his bank job after 30 years. He’s a total zero, dull and timid, with nothing to look forward to but 30 years of watering his dahlias. At his mother’s funeral he meets his Aunt Augusta for the first time since his baptism, and she immediately rocks his world by announcing that his mother was in fact not this biological mother. She then proceeds to disrupt his empty life by insisting on his accompaniment for a various trips, notably a ride on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and a furtive trip to Paraguay. She’s old, but with way more zest than her nephew, and their interplay is a clear call for everyone to live life and not let it drift by (carpe diem and all that). Of course, her interpretation of this involves smuggling a gold ingot, running around with a young Sierra Leonian pot merchant, and tracking down her Italian war criminal lover-all while spinning tales of her life and loves. Of course, it’s obvious to everyone except Henry that his “aunt” is his real mother, but that the one story which goes untold. In the end, it’s hard not to feel sad for the pitiful Henry, whose passive approach to life is characterized as being a product of his upbringing.
   Rating: 3 / 5

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