Novel: Travels with My Aunt

Overview
Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt is a comic, picaresque novel about sudden disruption and reinvention. The mild-mannered Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager with a life of punctual routine, is unexpectedly drawn out of his domestic shell by his eccentric Aunt Augusta. What begins as a few impulsive excursions quickly becomes a farcical and revealing odyssey that upends Henry's sense of respectability and family.

Plot
The story opens with Henry at a turning point, his orderly life destabilized in ways that force him to confront long-buried truths. Aunt Augusta, larger-than-life and delightfully irreverent, becomes his guide to a world of cosmopolitan cafés, dubious companions and clandestine ventures. Their travels are episodic and often absurd, featuring narrow escapes, mistaken identities and startling confessions that peel back layers of Henry's past and the origins of his identity.
As the journey unfolds, the pair move through a series of encounters that blur the line between comedy and moral ambiguity. Aunt Augusta's past, filled with lovers, political entanglements and flexible loyalties, casts new light on Henry's family story, producing revelations about parentage and the constructed nature of respectability. Henry's journey is less about a map than about an internal reorientation: he is forced to choose between the safety of convention and the messy, seductive freedom Augusta embodies.

Characters
Henry Pulling is an appealingly ordinary narrator whose voice mixes bewilderment, polite irony and increasing self-awareness. His evolution from passive observer to an active participant in his own life provides the novel's emotional center. Aunt Augusta is the incandescent opposite: brazen, witty and contemptuous of hypocrisy. She invigorates every scene, serving as both corrupter and liberator, and her contradictory morals challenge readers to reconsider easy judgments.
Supporting characters, amorous companions, shady associates and expatriate adventurers, populate the margins of Henry and Augusta's travels. They function as foils and catalysts, each encounter revealing new facets of Augusta's history and amplifying the novel's sense of unpredictability. Relationships are fluid, alliances shift, and the conventional idea of family proves to be more elastic than Henry ever imagined.

Themes
At its core, the novel explores the tension between conventional respectability and the liberating chaos of lived experience. Greene probes identity as something constructed and negotiable rather than fixed, showing how personal histories can be rewritten when the familiar is abandoned. The book also interrogates moral ambiguity: characters who flout laws and social codes are presented with sympathy, and the moral universe of the narrative favors human complexity over simple condemnation.
Travel here operates as metaphor as much as plot device. The journeys expose colonial and cosmopolitan undercurrents, and the novel's humour often serves to defuse, rather than resolve, ethical contradictions. Family ties and sexual politics are treated with a mixture of comic astonishment and genuine poignancy, producing a narrative that is both entertaining and quietly subversive.

Style and Tone
Greene balances satire and tenderness, deploying sharp, economical prose that lets character and situation generate much of the humour. The picaresque structure, episodic, digressive and character-driven, keeps the pace lively while allowing sudden shifts into more reflective or unsettling territory. The result is a novel that delights in its oddities and yet remains emotionally credible: a comic fable about the small horrors and surprising freedoms that open up when a life is displaced.