One of the mid to late Graham Greene novels, long after his probably more famous classics like Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, and The Heart of the Matter, this novel is from 1969 and involves a middle aged bank manager on the cusp of retirement going along with his elderly aunt on a series of world travels. Don’t let the prosaic basic plot outline fool you, however. The two are reunited at his mother’s, her sister’s, funeral and when she finds out that he’s a middle-aged man who’s never married, never spent much of the money he’s made, and does not possess a clear social life or have anyone in particular to bequeath his money to, she convinces him, with some help some early craziness in the novel, to go to the Middle East, to East Asia, to France and a host of other places. There, they encounter spies, hippies, druggies, and other fun people. He’s the opposite of excitable but he’s also not agreeable either.
This book most reminds me of a very very very mild-mannered version of The Hobbit, and like the The Hobbit, is a riff a very particular kind of genre — older person trying something exciting for the first time in their life and finding out that they might actually like it, a form perfected in Henry James’s The Ambassadors about an American man who falls in love in England when he’s sent to fetch his stepson.
This book is odd and funny and charming, but it’s got some seriousness to it as well. It’s not entirely focused on a kind of carpe diem attitude, as it reckons with the limits and constraints Catholicism puts on a person. It’s the last serious novel that Green wrote leading up to his nomination for the Nobel in the early 70s (an award he probably should have shared with Nabokov, as opposed to the two middling Swedish writers who awarded the prize to themselves — and who no one reads).
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Aunt-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0143039008/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=travels+with+my+aunt&qid=1572427204&sr=8-1)