Travels with my aunt, by Graham Greene

Graham Greene described this book (published in 1970) as “the only book I have written for the fun of it.”  If you are familiar with his more weighty works, this romp will come as a surprise – more like P. G. Wodehouse than the author of The quiet American.  There’s more than a dash of “Auntie Mame” too, if Mame was an eccentric British woman named Augusta who has led an adventurous life more on the wrong side of the law than otherwise.  Henry Pulling first meets his aunt, his mother’s sister, at his mother’s funeral.  A sixtyish former bank clerk, in his retirement he grows dahlias.  Travel is not something he has ever contemplated, yet somehow he soon finds himself on the Orient Express with Aunt Augusta on the way to Istanbul, but not until after the police visit his house in search of his mother’s urn, which seems now to be filled with marijuana.  His travels will take him many unusual places, in the company of odd characters, and often just a step ahead of the law, ending in Paraguay.  Unique and entertaining.  254 pp.