Lots of giggling over this exuberant, clever book about a staid, middle-aged English man, Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager with an obsession for dahlias, who embarks on an entirely new life after the death of his mother and begins jaunting around the world with his elderly and unconventional aunt.
Greene writes with humour, pathos and enormous insight of the pair’s adventures, which take them from France to Turkey and onto Paraguay, but I wasn’t too sure about the underlying message of it all. The novel seems to suggest that greater fulfilment and happiness lie in a rackety, semi-criminal life spent in the demi monde, living on the fringes of society, smuggling, breaking the law and lying to scratch a living using whatever means available.
Key to his trajectory is Henry’s eventual discovery that he’s much happier in the shady but exciting new world to which his aunt introduces him. Would that kind of life really be so great, though, I couldn’t help wondering. It’s true it presents more opportunities than the dull world of middle-class Southwood, but for me personally, life in Southwood would be infinitely preferable to hacking out a living in a benighted part of Latin America full of Nazi war criminals. That’s personal taste for you.
Greene’s a brilliant novelist, unparalleled in his understanding of people’s motivations and behaviour, his ability to depict human fragility in a variety of countries and his wit; he’s also got that chip of ice all great novelists are supposed to have. In his case, in spades. Nobody would have been telling him off for being too kind or empathetic, and his writing remains much the stronger for his acumen.
I also can’t help feeling uneasy about Henry’s decision, in his mid fifties, to marry the 15-year-old daughter of the local chief of customs, although he at least has the decency to be planning on waiting until she turns sixteen to seal the deal. Grisly. The poor child, trapped in a relationship with an old man who’d be starting to struggle physically, I thought.
Much of the book shows the tawdry and sordid side of a life jazzed up with surface glitter; we discover that the ‘aunt’ of the title has lived a life of heart-wrenching deception that I imagine would leave most people feeling angry, betrayed and deeply hurt, questioning how they could have used their lives so badly. But Greene doesn’t linger over these points, doesn’t even seem to entertain them; the aunt never really betrays that much pain, despite losing her only child to another woman, and the book instead moves swiftly onto the dénouement after disposing of one of the more likeable characters along the way. It’s fair to say the victim disappears in the most brutal, unsentimental manner possible.
It’s just all that candour and insight into people’s shittiness can be dismaying to read. All the darkness and danger made me long for the safety of Southwood, for a world where people are who they claim to be, boring and prosaic though that must make me sound, a place where the rules are obeyed, where manners matter and where the dahlias get watered whenever they’re looking thirsty.
Helen Fowler Writer 