TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a rollicking comedy about realizing you have wasted your life.
It’s as if Greene somehow put his writing through some kind of lens to find the funny side of his classic themes: guilt, secrets, Catholicism, Sierra Leone, sexual hangups. They’ all there, but somehow hilarious.
I found it quite disorienting. Counting back over the blog I seem to have read a lot of Greene (7! THE END OF THE AFFAIR, THE HEART OF THE MATTER, OUR MAN IN HAVANA, BRIGHTON ROCK, A SORT OF LIFE, WAYS OF ESCAPE, THE QUIET AMERICAN) and it was strange to see the other side of his typical neurotic style. Here for example he is having fun with funerals:
People are generally seen on their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.
I am not sure I will ever be able to go to a funeral again without laughing about that last phrase.
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is about a man who has lived a safe suburban life as a bank manager. His disreputable elderly aunt appears in his life, and she whisks him away on a wild series of journeys. Much of the joy in the novel is in the character of the aunt. Here, for example, she gives her reason for choosing a particular hotel by a bus station: “I like to be at the centre of all the devilry, with the buses going off to all those places.”
Or here she is on saving money:
. . I am not interested in economy. . . I am over seventy-five, so that is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. . . . I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury. . . They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food
Or, when he shows her his prize dahlias in his garden, she comments only: “I have always preferred cut flowers” I find this most hilarious of all, though I can’t say why.
In any case, the aunt has had lots of love affairs (some of them for money) and involves him all sorts of crime and drama, which is he thoroughly enjoys, though it takes some adjustment. Here he is at a strip club on his first journey with her:
It is fun to see the banker change his life, but it is also, this being Greene, rather sad. This is in small ways – for example he notes a thin dog following him and comments: I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope. God Graham! You are trying to write a COMIC NOVEL. Or worse yet, here he is on Christmas: Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling
Mostly the sadness comes from he dark shadow of the life it becomes clear he has wasted on following rules and doing what other people think he should. It’s a lesson that you can’t learn too often.