My list of sleeper prospects to jump on to the 2013 top 100 is now up for Insiders.
Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt
The narrator, Henry Pulling, has just lost his stepmother, who raised him from birth with his biological father, as the novel opens, and the funeral reunites him with an aunt he hasn’t seen in half a century. Aunt Augusta, who would likely fit well between Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha on the Wooster continuum of intimidating aunts, has, unbeknownst to Henry, lived a peripatetic life of adventure, and intends to have at least one more go before she finds herself alongside her late sister. Pulling is so stuck in his narrow life that he can’t quite accept that his aunt’s servant, a Senegalese man nicknamed Wordsworth, is actually her lover.
Unlike Greene’s “entertainments” – his own term for his popular novels, typically spy stories – the intrigue of Travels isn’t all that intriguing, and not even all that important beyond its role in forcing Henry to adjust his worldview. He worked in a stodgy industry, formed no permanent attachments to friends or lovers, and in retirement has taken up growing and breeding dahlias (perhaps an allusion, along with the Augusta/Agatha similarity, to Wodehouse). Augusta is trying to shake him out of his psychological torpor through exposure to her life of adventure, or misadventure, while also gradually showing him that things he long held to be true may not actually be so.
Greene’s dry wit comes through in some of the more ridiculous events, like Pulling inadvertently smoking pot while traveling the Orient Express, but those are just brief lulls in the increasingly serious meditations in which Pulling indulges as the book and his travels progress, on lost opportunities, life and death, and of course the difference between a safe, predictable life, and a more dangerous one with some actual upside.
I’m a huge fan of Greene’s novels, having now read fourteen of them, but would place this in the middle to the back of the pack. I’m still quite partial to Our Man in Havana
–
I mentioned on Twitter last month that I was reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From
–
Next up: Italo Calvino’s The Baron In The Trees