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You Had To Have Been There
Aug 2009
Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene - Hamlyn, 1970
* * *
In a recent article about British SF and its non-appearance in the Booker shortlist, Kim Stanley Robinson points out that the prize is generally given to "what usually turn out to be historical novels". He is right - of the last ten winners, nine are set largely or exclusively in the past (and the exception, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, is a notably odd and controversial choice). This is perhaps not so surprising, because a novel with a contemporary or future setting is a litmus test of a writer's quality. If it is ill-researched or conveys no great insights into the human condition, it will quickly become a period piece, of interest only for the colour of its setting and the parochial opinions expressed by its characters. Novels set in the past, by contrast, can disguise their lack of profundity by mining the reliable if overworked thematic seams of memory and the passing of time. Mainstream writers avoid writing about the present day or the future because they are afraid it will show them up for the second-raters that most of them are.
Authors of previous generations were made of sterner stuff. Graham Greene's output is almost entirely based in contemporary settings, including 1930s Brighton (Brighton Rock), Batista's regime in Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and the first Indo-China war (The Quiet American). Travels with my Aunt is, as the title implies, less location-centric, but it strongly reflects the manners and mores of its period (the late 1960s). Unfortunately there is not much more to it than that.
This period is of course the time of the clash between culture and counter-culture, and Greene's fine comedic notion was to represent the sides of this war in his two main characters but reverse the reader's expectations of their sympathies. Thus we have Henry Pulling, a prim bank manager straight out of the Captain Mainwaring school of casting whose only interest in life is his dahlias, and his Aunt Augusta, a formidable seventy-something with brilliant red hair, a penchant for travel and more than a few skeletons in her closet. They first meet at the funeral of Henry's mother, or rather, as Aunt Augusta soon reveals, his step-mother, Henry being a by-blow of his father that she covered up for. She then introduces him to her companion Wordsworth ("Is he your valet?" "Let us say he attends to my wants") and invites him on a trip on the Orient Express to Istanbul to visit an old friend called Abdul. En route, Henry encounters Tooley, a young woman from the 60s counter culture, and begins to come out of his shell.
The louche internationalism of it all is engaging, but the story is told from Henry's viewpoint and I simply couldn't believe in him as a character. The style is the main reason - as one would expect from the author of The Third Man, it is arch, ironic and morally ambiguous but utterly inappropriate for the voice of an uncomplicated man who likes his dahlias. One would expect him to much more shocked by his aunt's racy past and dubious acquaintances than he is. The aforementioned revelation about his mother is a case in point. His main response is to develop a case of the hiccoughs which seems implausible to start with, and he neither questions his aunt's story nor seriously pursues the question of who his real mother is. I can understand Greene's desire to wrong-foot his readers' expectations, but avoidance of the obvious questions that they would expect the protagonist to be concerned about is not a way to draw them into the story.
There are other problems. Wordsworth comes from Sierra Leone and speaks in a "comedy" demotic that comes across as patronising and borderline racist nowadays. To be fair to Greene, this was probably not his intent (though the shock value of a black man hooking up with a white woman clearly was) - Wordsworth does have an internal life, though his ultimate fate is unforgivable. The plotting is also dodgy with the second half of the book having almost nothing to do with the first. There is a twist ending that many readers - granted, not myself - will see coming.
All of this might have been excusable if Greene had had anything to say about the social changes that he is depicting. But Henry is too ambivalent about the scrapes that he gets into and too ambiguous in his moral responses to offer any real insights. And, sadly, the book's humour has dated too. Mixed relationships, comedy accents and elderly people with racy pasts are now very old hat. To appreciate this book now, you had to have been there.
Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene - Hamlyn, 1970
* * *
In a recent article about British SF and its non-appearance in the Booker shortlist, Kim Stanley Robinson points out that the prize is generally given to "what usually turn out to be historical novels". He is right - of the last ten winners, nine are set largely or exclusively in the past (and the exception, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, is a notably odd and controversial choice). This is perhaps not so surprising, because a novel with a contemporary or future setting is a litmus test of a writer's quality. If it is ill-researched or conveys no great insights into the human condition, it will quickly become a period piece, of interest only for the colour of its setting and the parochial opinions expressed by its characters. Novels set in the past, by contrast, can disguise their lack of profundity by mining the reliable if overworked thematic seams of memory and the passing of time. Mainstream writers avoid writing about the present day or the future because they are afraid it will show them up for the second-raters that most of them are.
Authors of previous generations were made of sterner stuff. Graham Greene's output is almost entirely based in contemporary settings, including 1930s Brighton (Brighton Rock), Batista's regime in Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and the first Indo-China war (The Quiet American). Travels with my Aunt is, as the title implies, less location-centric, but it strongly reflects the manners and mores of its period (the late 1960s). Unfortunately there is not much more to it than that.
This period is of course the time of the clash between culture and counter-culture, and Greene's fine comedic notion was to represent the sides of this war in his two main characters but reverse the reader's expectations of their sympathies. Thus we have Henry Pulling, a prim bank manager straight out of the Captain Mainwaring school of casting whose only interest in life is his dahlias, and his Aunt Augusta, a formidable seventy-something with brilliant red hair, a penchant for travel and more than a few skeletons in her closet. They first meet at the funeral of Henry's mother, or rather, as Aunt Augusta soon reveals, his step-mother, Henry being a by-blow of his father that she covered up for. She then introduces him to her companion Wordsworth ("Is he your valet?" "Let us say he attends to my wants") and invites him on a trip on the Orient Express to Istanbul to visit an old friend called Abdul. En route, Henry encounters Tooley, a young woman from the 60s counter culture, and begins to come out of his shell.
The louche internationalism of it all is engaging, but the story is told from Henry's viewpoint and I simply couldn't believe in him as a character. The style is the main reason - as one would expect from the author of The Third Man, it is arch, ironic and morally ambiguous but utterly inappropriate for the voice of an uncomplicated man who likes his dahlias. One would expect him to much more shocked by his aunt's racy past and dubious acquaintances than he is. The aforementioned revelation about his mother is a case in point. His main response is to develop a case of the hiccoughs which seems implausible to start with, and he neither questions his aunt's story nor seriously pursues the question of who his real mother is. I can understand Greene's desire to wrong-foot his readers' expectations, but avoidance of the obvious questions that they would expect the protagonist to be concerned about is not a way to draw them into the story.
There are other problems. Wordsworth comes from Sierra Leone and speaks in a "comedy" demotic that comes across as patronising and borderline racist nowadays. To be fair to Greene, this was probably not his intent (though the shock value of a black man hooking up with a white woman clearly was) - Wordsworth does have an internal life, though his ultimate fate is unforgivable. The plotting is also dodgy with the second half of the book having almost nothing to do with the first. There is a twist ending that many readers - granted, not myself - will see coming.
All of this might have been excusable if Greene had had anything to say about the social changes that he is depicting. But Henry is too ambivalent about the scrapes that he gets into and too ambiguous in his moral responses to offer any real insights. And, sadly, the book's humour has dated too. Mixed relationships, comedy accents and elderly people with racy pasts are now very old hat. To appreciate this book now, you had to have been there.
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