Product Description

Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, meets his old aunt for the first time in over 50 years. She persuades him to travel with her. Through his aunt, a veteran of Europe's hotel bedrooms, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society coming alive after a dull suburban lifetime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1065574 in Books
• Published on: 1991-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

Alistair Maclean written by Barbara Pym - bon voyage!
'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.

A triumphant comedy
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."

"What have we been smoking, Aunt Augusta?"
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