Travels with My Aunt

As I was just a few weeks away from my trip to India and Istanbul, I was itching to read something to get me into the spirit of things. I started with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, but the book wasn’t it. His Istanbul is black and white, always cold, and inhabited by jinns. I don’t know what it is with Pamuk and me. I love his writing; the prose is poetic, but I can never seem to get through any of his books in one go! I have started My Name is Red so many times and left it exactly in the same spot. Sigh.

Since I am such a fan of Graham Greene, I thought of giving Travels with My Aunt a shot. I really did not know what I was getting myself into. I had expected something funny, witty, and a fictional travelogue. After completing the novel, one thing I can say for certain is that this book is most definitely NOT a travelogue.

It’s a strange but entertaining story of Henry Pulling, a middle-aged lonely banker who meets his estranged Aunt Agatha after fifty years. The aunt then literally hijacks his life (and the novel) and takes him and us, the readers, along with us on a journey across continents, both in the past and present.

Greene wrote the book for the fun of it and you can tell. It’s full of ridiculous characters, and unbelievable escapades involving war criminals, smugglers, CIAs, and despotic generals and you, along with Pulling, try to keep pace with jaws hanging open.

While I enjoyed reading it, it did not possess the slow melancholy quality of Greene’s works, which seep into your psyche with every word. There is this one incident in the book where Aunt Agatha tells Henry why she prefers romantic novels to Walter Scott—“It moves a great deal quicker and there are fewer descriptions”.

It wouldn’t be completely unfair to say the same about Travels with My Aunt. I did like it though, because Greene has flexed his literary muscle to create a comical delight, which is funny, predictable, and sad.

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