Jenny said she had been richly rewarded: the character of Aunt Augusta is a wonderfully eccentric on

Jenny chose this book because she wanted a laugh. One of Graham Greene's 'entertainments' (as opposed to his more serious novels), it's the first-person narration of middle-aged sport car rentals in charleston bachelor Henry Pulling, newly retired from his position as a bank manager and committed to his safe suburban life of tending his dahlias - until, that is, the day of his mother's funeral when he meets an aunt he hardly knows. From this point on, his life is overturned: he is hurtled into an itinerant world of hippies, smugglers and war criminals which he has hardly guessed sport car rentals in charleston exists.
Jenny said she had been richly rewarded: the character of Aunt Augusta is a wonderfully eccentric one, although she said with a giggle that she thought she would be a real pain to be related to in real life.
Nearly everyone else agreed that the book had been fabulously entertaining and also brilliantly written. Well, I couldn't disagree with the latter: as usual with Greene there's a clarity to the prose - a sense of everything clearly visualized - which involves you from the first sentence. But then I said that actually I had a problem sport car rentals in charleston with the book because it was so rightwing. People seemed surprised at my making such a serious and political objection to such a piece of light entertainment, sport car rentals in charleston but I said that it was precisely because the book was so light, and treated with such urbanity subjects sport car rentals in charleston which are actually very serious, that I found it rightwing. It's not that I think you can't treat such subjects with humour, and I certainly wouldn't have minded a savage satire - indeed, I'd have loved one - but I found the urbanity hard to take (the apparent cosy stance that this murky underworld was just a good laugh), especially when you take into account the ending, sport car rentals in charleston which I won't reveal here, and the treatment of the fate of one of the characters, Wordsworth.
And then people couldn't think of anything much more to say about it, and we hadn't even been discussing it for half an hour. There was a bit of a silence and then John said, well perhaps we should consider if Greene did in fact have a more serious purpose. Maybe the book, published in 1969, was a comment on the changes in society at the end of the sixties sport car rentals in charleston - and indeed Henry says at one point near the end that he had been brought up unprepared sport car rentals in charleston for the modern world. But then someone else pointed out that the world he encounters after leaving his old-fashioned suburb is in fact even older, with its roots in the war and thirties Bohemia and back further. Or, said John, maybe it's about the way people exist unthinkingly, and that Henry who has unthinkingly obeyed the tame suburban rules can also, ironically, succumb unthinkingly to a quite opposite mode of existence.
But Clare said that maybe we were seeing too much serious purpose in the book, and I said well, in any case I still didn't find the humour savage enough, and somehow began to feel grumpy, quite the po-faced lefty, and not very sociable either, and sat and demolished a bowl of carrots instead, and Clare accused me of eating all the hummus.
Writer of prose fiction and plays for radio and stage. My short novels Too Many Magpies and the Birth Machine and my collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, are published by Salt.
A novella. How do we safeguard our children in a changing and dangerous world? And what if the greatest danger is from ourselves? ' Moving and compelling ' - Sarah Salway. Salt web page for Too Many Magpies sport car rentals in charleston with PDF sample Reviews of Too Many Magpies Read the Salt interview about Too Many Magpies Flying with Magpies : Virtual Book Tour
Stories. 'Quite swept me off my feet... Nothing would have induced sport car rentals in charleston me to interrupt Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines until I'd read them all' - Dovegreyreader Reviews of Balancing on the Edge of the World Read samples: A Glossary of Bread Compass and Torch Around the Edges of the World : Virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World Salt web page for Balancing on the Edge of the World with PDF sample