Jayakrishnan's Reviews > Travels With My Aunt

“My books are a good antidote to foreign travel and reinforce the sense of the England I love, but sometimes I wonder whether that England exists still beyond my garden hedge or further than Church Road. The future here seems to me to have no taste at all: it is like a meal on a menu, which serves only to kill the appetite. If you ever come back to England—'but that was a sentence I never finished, and I can't remember now what I intended to write.”

This is a wistful and ruminative action-adventure novel from Graham Greene. Greene’s ageing heroes are often humiliated and barely survive in an increasingly savage world. These gentlemanly heroes almost seem to be Greene’s not so gentle takedown of the hard-boiled American hero. Even though I am a big fan of the novels with hard-boiled American heroes, Greene’s ageing English characters have more depth and despite their pusillanimity, their inner life is a pleasure to read.

Henry Pulling, an ageing retired banker who likes to spend time with his dahlias in the garden is adopted by his 75-year-old aunt, after the death of his mother. He is pushed into adventures that sends him on journeys across Europe and South America with his aunt who might not be what she seems to be.

An important theme in the novel is the decline of British influence across the world.

“Your people don't count for very much here, I'm afraid. We provide their arms—and then there's the new hydroelectric station we are helping them to build . . . not far from the Iguazu Falls. It will serve Brazil too—but Brazil will have to pay them royalties. Great thing for the country.”

This is what a CIA agent who comes to Henry’s rescue after his arrest in Uruguay tells him, when Henry says the police do not seem to understand “British Embassy”.

Henry longs to retreat into his garden with his dahlias and write letters to Miss Keene, the only woman who has ever shown any interest in him. Like him, Miss Keene, an Englishwoman, travelled to South Africa to settle down and does not really fit into that world. Henry himself is often racked by a sense of anomie during his travels with his aunt. He longs for the Victorian England and often seeks solace in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the novels of Walter Scott and alcohol.

Henry does not seem to mind The Beatles -

“It seemed at first another and a happier world which I had re-entered: I was back home, in the late afternoon, as the long shadows were falling; a boy whistled a Beatle tune and a motor-bicycle revved far way up Norman Lane.”

He does on occasion enjoy the thrills of these adventures -

All the same I found sleep difficult to attain, even in my comfortable bed at the Royal Albion. The lights of the Palace Pier sparkled on the ceiling, and round and round, in my head, went the figures of Wordsworth and Curran, the elephant and the dogs of Hove, the mystery of my birth, the ashes of my mother who was not my mother, and my father asleep in the bath. This was not the simple life which I had known at the bank, where I could judge a client's character by his credits and debits. I had a sense of fear and exhilaration too, as the music pounded from the Pier and the phosphorescence rolled up the beach.

There is the usual talk of Catholicism and Christianity that are an obsession for Greene. But in Travels with My Aunt, it is rendered with humour -

“I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot—I mean I'm superstitious.”

And more than a hint of religious supremacy (but since I live in a country with competing gramophones/loudspeakers, I wholeheartedly agree with Greene here) -

"We have even gone as far afield together as Istanbul where I was a good deal disappointed with the famed Santa Sophia. I can say to you—as I couldn't say to my aunt—that I much prefer our own St John's Church for a religious atmosphere, and I am glad that the vicar doesn't feel it necessary to summon the faithful to prayer by a gramophone record in a minaret."

For a guy racked by Catholic guilt, not many critics seem to notice that Greene’s novels are quite racy and even downright pervy at times. Henry attracts the attention of a couple of young women one of whom is underaged. It is not the best Greene novel that I have read. But Greene has heaped up the novel with exotic locales, eccentric characters (there is a character who counts the time while pissing and notes it down each time, maintaining a record) and Henry's inner life.