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Summary: Alistair Maclean written by Barbara Pym - bon voyage!
Review: '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.
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Summary: A hilarious and twisted adventure about a man and his *aunt*
Review: A hilarious and twisted adventure about a middle-aged Englishman and his *aunt.* Extremely entertaining and a very quick read
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Summary: A Bittersweet Tale of Middle-Age
Review: 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.
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Summary: funny but disturbing
Review: 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.
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Summary: An entertaining read with amusing characters.
Review: I found this to be an enjoyable, easily-read novel with great characters. Aunt Augusta is a marvellous character and it's fun to follow the changes her nephew Henry undergoes as he learns to loosen up from her example. Though it's more a book to read for fun than one that will "change your life", it gives pause for thought about living life to its fullest.
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Summary: Reminds me of home....
Review: I grew up in Paraguay, where the protagonist of this novel winds up, and Greene does an amusing job of portraying some of the subtleties of living in a dictatorship (like the danger of blowing your nose on the wrong colored handkerchief). It is true that this is not a "great" novel, but if you are fascinated by the journey motif, as I am, it is worth your while to read it.
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Summary: Do yourself a favor
Review: 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.
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Summary: Top-Flight Entertainment with Stick-To-Your-Bones Insights
Review: 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.
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Summary: Brilliantly funny
Review: 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!
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Summary: "What have we been smoking, Aunt Augusta?"
Review: 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
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