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Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
Greene's first novel since The Comedians is much more insistently comic in tone which is perhaps why it doesn't work as well unless you've got a taste for antic haywire farce cum tour de force. The latter elements primarily inspired by Aunt Augusta, one of those outlandish originals which populate the English novel, first met by narrator Henry Pulling at his mother's funeral - or was it his mother? Henry leads a spotless life planting dahlias and re-reading Scott soon to be disrupted by Aunt Augusta and her African lover-manservant Wordsworth who pots pot in the urn containing his mother's ashes. And before long Henry is travelling with Augusta, from Brighton to Paris to Milan to Boulogne, being used to illustrate one of her tenets ( gold needs free circulation ), and participating in her search for the greatest of her many loves, the hard-to-find war criminal Visconti. This along with Interpol's interpolations, a grass roots girl from America and her father, a C.I.A. official of sad mien, etc., etc. All roads lead finally to Paraguay and here in a small backwater there are touches of the old Greene - the picturesque shabby scenery; the worldlier applied insights; the obstreperous aplomb quieting down to a gentler irony which redeems Henry's virtuously wasted years and the book. Only a mixed success. Perhaps Swift's humor is never, by invention got. (Kirkus Reviews)
