Customer Reviews

Travels with My Aunt (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

'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.

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."

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

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.

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.

If your idea of a good novel is something that takes you where you've never been before and leaves you wanting more, consider this one. An English gentleman is forcibly retired from a job as bank branch manager and is looking forward to a quiet end of his life, when into his life bounces his elderly aunt, a world-traveler and bon-vivant. She proceeds to shake up his staid existence, and to make it abundantly clear that he ought either to join her in her reckless and dangerous travels or continue to roll downhill to a certain, but dull end. Lucky for us readers he chooses the former, though not without grave misgivings. The message here is to all of us middle-agers: Do you really want to stop living? A tempting, juicy tale, and Graham Greene is outstandingly good in the telling, at his best, really. The characters we meet along the way are unforgettable. So sink down in your easy chair and relish this breath of fresh air from a master of the form.

I enjoyed this book but I found it disturbing in the same way that I find Nabokov's "Lolita" disturbing. Greene divided the chapters into two parts and they are very different in tone. The first is a light narrative of Henry's travels with his picaresque Aunt Augusta, who has many associations with people outside of the law. The second part of the book starts with an encounter by Henry and Augusta with a woman who has shown a long-time devotion to the memory of Henry's dead father.

Augusta's antipathy to this woman sets the dark mood that underlies the remainder of the book. Augusta's unsentimental amoralism is no longer so amusing. Henry's involvement in this world is like Alice trying to establish residency in Wonderland. Henry remarks about how much he has changed and yet in some ways he has not changed at all. He moves from passively drifting in one world to doing the same in another. He is incapable of love or attachment and our sympathy toward him makes us question our own values.

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.

This book is about the re-examination of his life by a staid British middle-aged bank manager. At the beginning Harry accepts the conventional ideas of his day and is headed for a common retired life. His aunt (and something more...) arrives at the scene and promptly drags him to another world, a world where the assumptions Harry lived by are cast by the wayside. With time Harry grows, and is able to attain the pleasures life offers (the word attain has been used intentionally with thought). The book ends on a charming note with Harry marrying a younger woman with whom he reads poetry. Greene's message is universal and endures through time. Every age has its assumptions, and the perceptive reader will be able to filter out Greene's message even if the setting looks unfamiliar.

JS

One does not think that well written prose and humour should be mixed nor can they be mixed, but this book proves they can. An extremely funny tale of a staid retired bank manager and his travels with his Aunt (who seemed to know all the rougues worth knowing). You will travel through the Europe and onto South America, get involved in drug trafficking among other things. A wonderful read!