The Towers of Trebizond

by Rose Macaulay, Jan Morris (Introduction)

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.

Genres: Fiction, Travel, Classics, Humor, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Middle East

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Emilie Rose Macaulay, whom Elizabeth Bowen called "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century," was born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master. Descended on both sides from a long line of clerical ancestors, she felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill the early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville, and on coming down lived with her family first in Wales, then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There she began a writing career which was to span fifty years with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. When her sixth novel, The Lee Shore (1912), won a literary prize, a gift from her uncle allowed her to rent a tiny flat in London, and she plunged happily into London literary life.

From BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ros...

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh to travel, isn't that just the thing, everyone's favorite hobby, to get away and have adventures, see life from different angles, take in history and view the panorama of the world all at the same time, you go some wheres and see some things, but unless you are traveling for pure thrill-seeking or just to find a new setting to drink and to flirt, you go to someplace and see those things and you are really seeing all the things before them, the history of a place, reading and thinking and dreaming about all the things that used to be in that place, and so you find yourself in front of something that is quaint or beautiful or melancholy or depressing or even inexplicable but it is much more than that specific thing or place, it is at once itself and also all the things that came before, things you can never see and can only imagine. oh to time travel, that would really be the thing.

the 1956 novel Towers of Trebizond is about a trip to Turkey and beyond, and then back again to England. our narrator is Laurie and is accompanied, at first, by eccentric Aunt Dot and the vaguely malevolent Father Chantry-Pigg. they have different goals: Dot wants to emancipate women, Pigg wants to convert Muslims into high Anglicans, Laurie wants to relax & paint & contemplate history and religion & think on an adulterous, long-lasting, still current love affair. the whole thing is quite deadpan and, I suppose, almost stereotypically "upper-middle class English" - chatty, often dry, eccentric, judgmental, amusing, and amused. for a fully grown and obviously well-educated character, Laurie has an almost peculiarly child-like voice, faux-naïf I suppose. but perhaps not so faux at times. and at other times, not so naïf either. while there is a genuine and alternately irritating and charming innocence to Laurie's every thought process, there is also an odd and winsome sort of wisdom as well, one that casually demolishes religion and government and nations and nationalism at every turn.

the style takes some getting used to. as with many of my reviews, I tried to imitate it a little bit, in this case in my first paragraph. many long, long sentences, full of asides and off-kilter bits of commentary, often followed up by a brief, to-the-point sentence that runs in a different direction. so at first it was a challenge for me to stay focused on the story at hand as I lost myself in all the rather fabulously constructed but initially quite distancing prose. but as is often the case with me, a challenging style will also keep my interest, even when I'm being frustrated, and so after a few chapters what was a difficulty became a genuine delight. a witty and enchanting delight.

whimsical Laurie nonchalantly brings home an ape (the kind of ape is never specified), and there is a charmingly detailed little sequence showing the ins and outs of living with and training an ape who you want to act and think as a human. this is a minor (but thematically relevant) part of the book, but it is so delightful that I had to mention it.

because this novel is so droll and delightful, it was a painful shock when it took a surprise turn towards the tragic in its final act. shocking but it also rang true - a bleak and clear-eyed and not very warm kind of true. well, I guess I should have been warned when that one character gets eaten by a shark early on, and not much is made of it - Towers of Trebizond has a fist of cold iron underneath that lovely little glove.

Laurie travels like I've traveled: slowly, preferring to really get to know a place in its current incarnation while simultaneously imagining all the lost wonders of what came before. I suppose it can be a rather melancholy way of traveling, looking at the present but devoting as much time to the contemplation of the past, what has been lost and what can never be seen again. so I really got Laurie, I connected to the character and Laurie's oddly offhand, distracted, casual, thoughtful but still rather shallow way of looking at the world. I've also traveled through Turkey and been to many of the same places. Surprisingly, not only did I understand and agree with her assessment of the country and its people - over 50 years later! - I also found I was in almost complete sympathy with her thoughts on so many other things: how history can be viewed and how the history of humanity itself and its never-changing nature can be viewed - two entirely different things; religion in general and her confused and rather longing thoughts on God and belief; how love can feel and what that feeling can turn into when the object of your love is forcibly and permanently taken from you; how a person can then distract themselves with all the wonders of life and the world, and so how a person can just carry on, survive, a part of you dead but the rest of you still able to live and find pleasure and even delight in what the world has to offer, a shadow of true happiness but at least not a pale one. Trebizond's towers, and the city itself, will always be a place where Laurie can return, in her mind or in person, as a place that soothes and delights, a kind of constant, both a sweet memory and a pleasing reality... but how can any such place be the same, be seen as the same even if it actually remains the same, how can it give the same reward when you yourself have been changed?

[Christmas Carol ꧁꧂ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've changed my mind and I'm awarding the full 5★. I found the ending a bit abrupt and the change in tone quite startling - but it is 20th century. That was the way 20th century fiction rolled!

Or is it fiction? I've read a review that describes this novel as a roman à clef which is certainly how it feels. Definitely a satire about the travels of the wide-eyed and guileless Laurie and her travels through Turkey and beyond.

I found this old map helpful;

It isn't long before you realise the camel (subject of one of the most famous opening lines in literature) isn't the only one not right in the head!

The Retro Reads Group didn't think this camel looked deranged enough;

Well, I think it has a distinctly sly and self satisfied expression - & I couldn't find a picture of an Arabian Dhalur camel - white or otherwise.

Macaulay wrote this book in her late sixties - a remarkable achievement, and possibly a remarkable feet of memory. I really want to do some more research.

Undated photo from my dustjacket

This book is a keeper and as I'm trying to downsize my collection I can't give higher praise than that!

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is here thinking about patriotism :

I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one’s country than one’s county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one’s continent, and best of all to love one’s planet.

In Robert McCrum’s book The 100 Best Novels in English we find

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

The first two are so-so, the last one is diabolically awful, and yet here they are in a book listing the 100 Best Novels in English EVER. So there is a tradition of critics loving extremely lame tame mildewed comic writing. The Towers of Trebizond fits neatly into this horrible little list. It’s a deadpan travelogue about some posh religious types who think that the thing to do would be to travel to remote north Turkey with an amusing camel and convert the Muslims to the Anglo-Catholic sect within the Church of England. The first 20 pages are almost perversely designed to put off any reader not intimately interested in the 60 major subdivisions of the Protestant faith with which the author makes so much innocent fun and I salute all readers who trudge through that ghastly thicket into the more normally boring travel writing with its endless minor aggravations and endless mild spoofing of every foreigner and endless self-congratulatory self-deprecation that the English used to weaponise so efficiently.

No doctors had to be called to stitch up my sides after splitting them laughing so hard at this book which I gladly DNFed at the half way point.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a pleasant surprise, full of understated humor and wisdom about the pull of the ancient world on the self and the scope of human aspiration and folly over religion. It fits the bill for my love of travel books that portray together an outer journey and an inner journey of the traveler. As a novel we are looking through the mask of young Laurie as she recounts a tale of traveling with her Aunt Dot and a stuffy old Anglican priest, Father Chantry-Pigg, under the goal of scouting out communities along the Black Sea for their promise as targets for Anglican missionary work. They travel mostly by camel, which they bring by boat from England to Istanbul, and, after picking up a car and their Turkish friend, a lady professor converted to their church on a former stay in London, set out to the east along the Black Sea. Even before this motley crew hits the road, it’s clear that mostly they are out on a lark.

It’s practically in Aunt Dot’s blood to seek out the most remote, inaccessible communities in her work for the missionary society, especially in areas with an ancient, exotic history. It’s a family tradition for centuries to fuse the evangelical metaphor of fishing for souls to convert and actual fishing. She loves camping out under the stars. Her subversive personal mission is to nurture the hunger for freedom among women under the yoke of submission and constraint of Islam and other religions. Chantry-Pigg tolerates her radical streak and aligns with her desires to visit all the ruins of the ancient they can fit into their travels. His obsession is with the Byzantines and the continuity of the Greeks in their high civilization. He is a constant advocate for the High Anglican traditions closest to Catholicism, but he is not driven by missionary fervor. Instead, his secret aim seems lie with sainthood, as he wants to test out the healing powers of relics has spirited out of churches back home. Each hopes to have adventures significant enough to justify turning their journals into books. Laurie’s job is to prepare watercolors which might be used to illustrate Dot’s book.



An early high point to their trip is their visit to the alluring exotic Trebizond, ancient capital of Byzantium in decline from the 13th to 16th centuries after the Ottoman Turks made their empire, and long a commercial gateway to Persia and the Caucasus. The Muslims there are not receptive, and they are miffed that the Seventh Day Adventists and Billy Graham’s crusades seem to by making more inroads in the fishing business. But their professor friend, Halide, doubts that any branch of Christianity can make significant lasting conversions of the Muslims. And despite the secularism brought to Turkey by the regime of Attaturk, the women she feels will never brave the choice to desert conservative traditions. The choice to go bareheaded is still governs provincial societies far from Istanbul.

“They said it led to unbridled temptation among men.”
“Men must learn to bridle their temptations,” said aunt Dot, always an optimist. “They must be converted too.

From her own wavering conversion, Halide sees a particular lack of fit for the Anglican faith, and she reflects back to Laurie what she already knows on how this goal is not what really drives Dot:

They have said to me, ‘The Bible, yes. Jesus Christ, yes. Holy Communion, no.’ And the Church of England, isn’t it, is built around Holy Communion, what you call the Mass. That is what your Father Chantry-Pigg would tell people; and it won’t go well with Moslems, I can assure you. I know what I talk about. Dot is a romantic woman, her feet aren’t on the ground. She thinks she is practical, a woman of business, but no, she is a woman of dreams. Mad dreams, dreams of crazy impossible things. And they aren’t all of conversion to the Church, oh no. Nor all of the liberation of women, oh no. Her eyes are on far mountains, always some far peak where she will go. She looks so firm and practical, that nice face, so fair and plump and shrewd, but look in her eyes, you will sometimes catch a strange gleam. Isn’t it so?”

As they continue further east, they start to feel the lure of Armenia and climbing Mount Ararat. But the prospect of finding Seventh Day Adventists at the top waiting for the Second Coming tempers their enthusiasm. Instead they both find themselves wishing to visit the Caucasus, full of ancient ruins of the Tartars, to imagine a time of trade in Circassian slaves, to experience people who drink the fermented mare’s milk called koumiss. I won’t say anything more about their adventures, but instead I will delve a bit into the story of Laurie, who continually draws the reader onward on a quest to know what makes her tick.

We get to spend more time with her in Trebizond, which she notes as “a place which had some strange hidden meaning, which I must try to dig up.” In this part of a long riff about the Byzantines she captures so well the sense I have gotten from visiting places with ancient history:

…they had had no dull moments, they had babbled and built and painted and quarreled and murdered and tortured and prayed and formed heresies and doctrines and creeds and sacramentaries, they had argued and disputed and made factions and rebellions and palace revolutions, and to and fro their feet seemed to pass among the grasses that had been marble floors , and the last Greek empire brooded like a ghost in that forlorn fag end of time to which I too had come, lost and looking for I did not know what, while my camel munched on leaves of the carob tree outside the ruined wall.


Towers of Trebizond in a fanciful rendering by Pisanello, 1436

We come to learn that Laurie, despite her family history, cannot fully commit to the Anglican faith because she is not ready to confess for her sins (which I ain’t telling). And that she is not above using a bit of blackmail to garner favors to make her way (is that a form of feminism?). And as we follow her delightful journey south though Turkey, and on through Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon to Jerusalem, we feel the need to pin her down as either a cynical realist or romantic dreamer. Along the way she acquires a Barbary ape as a pet, and you will be challenged to figure out what kind of game she (and Macauley) are playing over the impossible things she is able to train the ape to do. It is a relief not to hold back on feeling the comedy in this tall tale.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Take my camel,” said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from the animal on her return from High Mass.

First lines. I love them. Because, if they're like this, how can you not stop whatever you're doing and insist on finding out just who could write such a thing!

And who couldn't love a camel?

I'm about two reviews away from a discussion of how I may not be a feminist though I would very much like to be one. [You may want to read that first - The Pumpkin Eater - even though it's not written yet, to understand what I'm trying to say.] So, with that confusing preamble, I think this is one of the great Feminist novels. But since I may not be one, I could be wrong. So Aubrey you should read this and see if I'm right. And Janet, you should read this since you keep your passports. Karen, you'd howl. Garima, you'd howl. Fionnuala, you'd fall in love with it. Kalliope, you too. Michael, you might book a steamer to Turkey. Geoff, you might book a steamer to Turkey. Annie and Sara (if you read this), you should read this. Lisa and Ted, you're not reading this? Is something wrong? Nathan, not all weird stuff is modern and male. Even, dare I say it, real life people should read this too.

Laurie is traveling with her Aunt Dot (and that camel) and the Dickensian-named Father Chantry-Pigg to the Mid-East, the Crimea (so topical) and Turkey and points beyond. Dot and Pigg are on a missionary quest, but aunt Dot also is obsessed with gathering intelligence of the ill-treatment of Moslem women (so more topical). It's less clear why Laurie is accompanying them since she has her doubts. Dot and Pigg, an unlikely duo, cross illegally into Russia. Laurie deals with the underlying theme of her adultery. She is unashamed.

I was a religious child Laurie says, when I had time to give it thought; at fourteen or so I became an agnostic, and felt guilty about being confirmed, though I did not like to say so. I was an agnostic through school and university, then, at twenty-three, took up with the Church again; but the Church met its Waterloo a few years later when I took up with adultery; (curious how we always seem to see Waterloo from the French angle and count it a defeat) and this adultery lasted on and on, and I was still in it now, steaming down the Black Sea to Trebizond, and I saw no prospect of its ending except with death--the death of one of the three people, and perhaps it would be my own.

The camel isn't the only animal with a starring role. There's an ape: a chimp, I think, named Suleiman. This strained credulity. A chimp that learns to drive? But, Laurie took him to church. High Mass. And Suleiman participates. Long after I forget the rest of the story, if I ever do, I will remember Suleiman in church, mimicking the other worshippers.

Read this.

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

On GoodReads I think my review has made this novel being rated 1500 times and being reviewed 278 times. So, it’s been read and been reviewed but doesn’t come anywhere close to being a ‘best-seller’. It is considered by Wikipedia to be her most important work, and the New York Review of Books has re-published it in their classic series (with an introduction by Jan Morris). So, it is well-respected.

The book I got from the library is a first edition (US) from when it was published in 1956. It shows on the front cover of the dustjacket a pen and ink drawing of an Iman, an Anglican cleric, a women covered from head to toe in a veil, an English-looking woman with a hat on, and in the background a woman astride a camel, along with other sundry characters. These are drawings of some of the characters who are in the novel including Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg (in their 60s) and Aunt Dot’s niece, Laurie (probably in her 30s or early 40s), and the camel who is deemed mentally deranged at times (yes, the camel). They are visiting Turkey. Time period is probably contemporaneous when Macaulay wrote this novel, in the 1950s.

Summary from the inner cover of the dust jacket: "It tells a beautifully absurd story of Aunt Dot, her niece Laurie, and Father Chantry-Pigg who go to Turkey to explore the possibilities of establishing a High Anglican mission there. The object of the party is twofold: Father Chantry-Pigg’s being to set up Anglican outposts in Turkey and to climb Mount Ararat, Aunt Dot’s to emancipate Turkish women into wearing hats, bathing in the sea, and playing tric-trac like their menfolk. Laurie’s object is pleasure, musings on the historical past, and dreams of her lover, a married cousin whose mistress she has been for ten years and whose love has drawn her from the church she still impossibly believes in.”

The book is hard for me to describe…. it’s sort of like a travelogue and I think that is in part what Macaulay was known for…writing about other countries. It is also semi-autobiographical. This article from the Paris Review written by Lucy Scholes tells us the back story of Rose Macaulay which is fascinating (maybe because I read Towers of Trebizond, but I think it is more than that because it talks of her personal library and what it contained and how she lost her books as well as important letters from her lover in a fire in London during the Blitz in WW II).

I found some parts of the book to be boring, but I think it was this passage early on that convinced me to read on and finish it. It’s when Laurie is relating something the Reverend Billy Graham told an audience at a revival meeting she was attending in Turkey about immorality:
• “…and at the Judgment Day God would say “You thought no one saw you that evening on the beach, but I saw you, I took a picture of you.”
I knew it…when I die I will be called onto the carpet by God and he’ll produce a bunch of Polaroids showing me all the times I sinned in my lifetime…he took pictures of me sinning to prove it!!!
I thought it was quite funny, and this book does contain humor and some seriousness (a shocker of a final chapter…was totally not expecting how she ended it).

Fascinating review of another novel by her — The World My Wilderness [1950] — but also a brief and interesting biography of her life by Lucy Scholes: The Paris Review - Re-Covered: The World My Wilderness - The Paris Review

Reviews:
• Very good review! https://www.salon.com/2004/03/08/maca...
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/the-towe...
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2018/...

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How every one gets about,” said aunt Dot. “I wonder who else is rambling about Turkey this spring. Seventh Day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, writers, diggers, photographers, spies, us, and now the B.B.C. We shall all be tumbling over each other. Abroad isn’t at all what it was.”

This is a travel book I have chosen as a consolation prize for my long planned and constantly delayed trip to Trabzon. I have been fascinated by this ancient city after reading historical books, in particular Dorothy Dunnett, who has one of her House of Niccolo adventures in this place.
Rose Macaulay shares some of my fascination with ancient history and with romantic ruins, but her semi-fictional travel journal is much more ambitious in scope, dealing with the meaning of life, with love and with religion. The book is also fascinating and immensely rewarding in its brutal honesty, its sharp wit and its erudition, its earnest effort to reconcile a spiritual thirst with a changing world where once rock solid values are discarded in favour of selfishness and instant gratification.
As such, and as it mirrors some of my own spiritual fumblings and poorly articulated beliefs, the book became as important to me as another recent lecture, similar in scope and in its confessional tone: ‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively.

I too follow professions, but at some distance behind, and seldom catch up with them. My favourite one is painting watercolour sketches to illustrate travel books, which is a good way to get abroad, a thing I like doing better than anything else, for I agree with those who have said that travel is the chief end of life.

Laurie, whose memoir of a journey to Turkey and the Middle East in the company of her extravagant aunt Dot and of the staid Anglican Father Chantry-Pigg, forms the backbone of the novel, puts down in this journal format not only piquant details of people and places seen, but also her sharp, satirical observations of the way the world is changing, of her need for romance in her life and for a higher purpose than day to day living.
At the beginning, the tone is light and the pen is merciless as it notes how Turkey has become like a honey pot for all sorts of dubious characters in search of fortune or fame, as well as a front line in the Cold War.

Actually, we saw so many British spies in disguise spying in Turkey that I cannot mention all of them, they kept cropping up wherever we went, like flying saucers and pictures of Ataturk and people writing their Turkey books.

The white camel that aunt Dot insists on riding everywhere she goes [ There is something, aunt Dot said, about a white camel that gives prestige, and particularly religious prestige. ], including at High Mass in England, provides many memorable scenes of mayhem and of stubborn rebellion. A semi-emancipated Turkish feminist who converted to Anglicanism during her studies at Oxford, Dr. Halide, is a welcome partner in intelligent conversations about local customs, traditions and the oppression of women in Islamic countries.

Interestingly, the express purpose of the journey is to convert the heathen to the true religion, something Laurie has her private doubts about and something she is rather glad when it comes to nothing in the face of the locals reticence.

... I did not mind how long we stayed on this lake, it was much better than driving or riding about Armenia hawking the C. of E. to infidel dogs who thought we were mad and were probably right.

Swimming and fishing in remote places, enjoying the local food and the fireside stories of their guides holds some fascination for Laurie, but nothing compared to the forceful call of the mystical towers of Trebizond. The writer hopes to find in this fabled place an answer to her romantic dreams, a mirror to what she sees as her own ruined life, a new strength to go on living when she is abandoned by the people closest to her Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg abandon her without any money in order to sneak into the Soviet Union, her illicit lover dies in a tragic accident, a fellow writer turns out to be a shameless plagiarist, etc
It is no surprise that Laurie must face up to disappointments when comparing dreams and reality ...

Expecting the majestic, brooding ghost of a fallen empire, we saw, in the magnificent stagey setting, an untidy Turkish port. The ghost would be brooding on the woody cliffs and ravines, haunting the citadel and palace, scornfully taking no notice of the town that Trebizond now was, with the last Greeks expelled by the Father of the Turks twenty years back.

... yet something magical about the place survives in the old stones, some answers can still be deciphered from the light streaming through ruined windows, in the capital of a forlorn column, in the words of an ancient Greek peasant.

When I saw it, I felt that I would not mind quite a long stay in Trebizond, and that, hidden in the town and its surroundings, there was something I wanted for myself and could make my own, something exiled and defeated but still alive, known long since but forgotten.

In the derelict forlorn grandeur of that fallen Greek empire with its ghosts Laurie takes stock of her loneliness and of her lack of prospects and, accompanied only by the recalcitrant white camel, she embarks on a long and torturous journey back to her country [and to her own interrupted life], first with a self-imposed exile amongst the ruins of Trebizond, later on a stressful cross-country ride towards Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, where she hopes to meet with her secret lover and with her estranged mother.

One of the emblematic passages in the book deals with dreamers. The focus is on aunt Dot, but I believe the same could be said about Laurie, who might be the most level-headed and keenly observant person in the book, yet who harbours the same inner yearnings as the rest of us.

Dot is a romantic woman, her feet aren’t on the ground. She thinks she is practical, a woman of business, but no, she is a woman of dreams. Mad dreams, dreams of crazy, impossible things. And they aren’t all of conversion to the Church, oh no. Nor all of the liberation of women, oh no. Her eyes are on far mountains, always some far peak where she will go. She looks so firm and practical, that nice face, so fair and plump and shrewd, but look in her eyes, you will sometimes catch a strange gleam.

This passage comes up in a conversation with Dr. Halide, who reiterates the theme in a later discussion with Laurie, complaining about the yellow press trying to suggest a scandalous affair between aunt Dot and the Anglican priest:

“Romance! All they mean by romance is some commonplace tale of love. What do they know of the romance of the deserts and the mountains and the sea, the great Turkey cities buried in sands that we dig out piece by piece, the roaming of nations across wild lands to build grand civilizations ...”
“And palaces,” I added, for romance excited me, “and harems and eunuchs and fountains playing in the courts, and peacocks spreading their tails in the sun, and paved roads running down to the port where ships go in and out with purple sails, ladden with cargoes of nuts and Circassian slaves, and camel caravans coming up from Arabia, jingling their bells through Petra and Palmyra and Baalbek, heading for Byzantium and the Bosphorus, and the walls of Acre standing in the green sea, and the Sea of Galilee in the dawn, and Jerash standing with its carved colonnades in the mountains, and Tenebrae in the darkness of some great church, and Mass among tall candles, and ...”

>>><<<>>><<<

The romantic journey is definitely turning into a spiritual journey in the second half of the memoir, as Laurie is forced to travel alone with her thoughts and as her visit to ancient lands and her conversations with various clergymen open up the subject of religion.
Some readers might be turned off by the lack of action and by the reduction in humorous or exotic incidents, but I found myself invested more strongly in the way Rose Macaulay finds the right approach to examine her own family legacy of Anglicanism against the framework of an increasingly amoral world and of exposure to various other religious points of view.

... the Victorian agnostics wrote to one another about it continually, it was one of their favourite topics, for the weaker they got on religion the stronger they got on morals, which used to be the case more than now.
I am not sure when all this died out, but it has now become very dead.

[...] we talked about everything else, such as religion, love, people, psycho-analysis, books, art, places, cooking, cars, food, sex, and all that. And still we talk about all these other things, but not about being good or bad.

Laurie is personally involved in solving this equation : how to balance good and evil in order to be reconciled to the person you are through your actions. Part of the reason she took the journey was to make a decision about having an affair with a married man. It is also the reason she considers herself a failed Christian woman, who cannot go to confession because she will not feel guilty for being in love.

... I have often thought that it is a most strange thing that that important part of human life, the struggle that almost every one has about good and evil, can not now be talked of without embarrassment, unless of course one is in church.

So now the writer talks to her intimate travel diary, a place traditionally reserved for being honest with oneself. Part of this honesty for Laurie is to examine if the problem rests with her sins or with the doctrine of the Church. And which of these churches really holds the ultimate answer?

Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failing of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of saddest things that has happened in all the world.

I came myself to the Church as an adult, in order to understand how it came about and why it held so much sway over human afairs over so many centuries. So Rose Macaulay’s soul searching is right up my alley, especially when she demonstrates that a comparative, historical religious approach is better than taking things on faith. Whether it is about Justinian and the aphthartocathertic heresy, or the merits of St Basil teachings, the intransigence and the dogmatic killings in the Middle East [ governments should rid their minds of this foe complex which leads to so much trouble ] or the revelations of Clement of Alexandria, Laurie’s arguments seem pertinent and still relevant today in our climate of militant sectarian hatred.

Churches are wonderful and beautiful and they are vehicles for religion, but no church can have more than a very little of the truth. It must be odd to believe, as some people do, that one’s Church has all the truth and no errors, for how could this possibly be? Nothing in the world, for instance, could be as true as the Roman-Catholic Church thinks it is, and as some Anglicans and Calvinists and Moslems think their Churches are, having the faith once for all delivered to the saints. I suppose this must be comfortable and reassuring. But most of us know that nothing is as true as all that and that no faith can be delivered once for all without change, for new things are being discovered all the time, and old things dropped, like the whole Bible being true, and we have to grope our way through a mist that keeps being lit by shafts of light, so that exploration tends to be patchy, and we can never sit back and say, we have the Truth, this is it, for discovering the truth, if it ever is discovered, means a long journey through a difficult jungle, with clearings now and then, and paths that have to be hacked out as one walks, and dark lanterns swinging from the trees, and these lanterns are the light that has lighted every man, which can only come through the dark lanterns of our minds.

All this struggle is not simply an academic exercise for Laurie. She is confronted with the realities of her aunt Dot’s insisting to convert strangers to one of those limited doctrines, with the official condemnation by the church of her own love story, with the restrictions on travel and documents in the conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

And then I thought how odd it was, all that love and joy and peace that flooded over me when I thought about Vere, and how it all came from what was a deep meanness in our lives, for that is what adultery is, a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of all this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined.

The greatest contrast is to be found between the aspirations of what a church is meant to be, and what the world is becoming right before Laurie’s eyes. The next two [rather long] passages hold for me the key to the inner conflict in the life of our narrator.

All this about the world being spoilt makes me see it in a kind of green corruption, like over-ripe cheese, glistening in morbid colours and smelling of decay as it moulders to pieces. Of course this is not really what is happening physically, as the spoiling is by raw brashness and ugly drab newness, a kind of rash, spreading and crowding everywhere. I would rather have the greenish putrescence. Vulgar buildings, vulgar music, vulgar pictures, vulgar newspapers, vulgar taste, all raw and brash and ugly, but underneath is the putrescence and the softness of the falling apart like rotten cheese, in which we are the greedy mites, eating away at it all with enjoying relish.

... the Church was meant to be a shrine of the decencies, of friendship, integrity, love, of the poetry of conduct, of the flickering, guttering candles of conscience. And, above all this, it seems to be playing some tremendous symphony; the music drifts singing about the arches and vaults, only faintly and partly apprehended by us, the ignorant armies that clash by night in perpetual assault and rout, defeated by the very nature of their unending war, for ever on the run, for ever returning to the charge, then on the run again, like the surging of the waves of the sea.

In the end, the argument is that, like Laurie in the novel and Rose Macaulay in her private life, life is a journey every one of us must make on our own. The only thing guaranteed is that we will meet with pain and disappointments, but that we must find the strength to go on living.

When a companionship like ours suddenly ends, it is to lose a limb, or the faculty of sight; one is, quite simply, cut off from life and scattered adrift, lacking the coherence and the integration of love. Life, I supposed, would proceed; I should see my friends, go abroad, go on with my work, such as it was, but the sentient, enjoying principle which had kept it all ticking, had been destroyed.

I have saved, as usual, the best for last: a passage attributed to Clement of Alexandria, about our journey through life, and about how to behave on the road.

We may not be taken out and transported to our journey’s end, but must travel thither on foot, traversing the whole distance of the narrow way. One mustn’t lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends, and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatize and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here.

[Dillwynia Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most bizarre books I have ever read - and I have read some truly strange stuff.

I found the book moved along a gradient from comedy to almost essay and that takes some doing, especially as, I the reader, didn't object. I laughed loudly and frequently at the biazarre behaviour, discussions and commentary of our narrator and companions. The chief theme - Anglo-Catholicism is not to everyone's taste and I suspect it would lose some readers, but this was a theme dear to Macauley's heart, and one not well expressed in literature. In fact, I doubt that many people are even aware of the Anglo-Catholic sect within the Church of England (the Queen is one BTW). I grew up in a High Church household, but not deeply within the Anglo-Catholic theology. I wouldn't encounter this sect till living in Sydney and singing.

It also helps if you have been raised on Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford. If you don't have this background, you just won't find this funny, and more likely ponderous. However, if you are a fan of these two writers, then you will be captivated by her writing and will be sucked in, and most likely deal with the occasionally mildly preachy to didactic discussion on religion. Macauley never gives you a definitive answer, just her thoughts, feelings and beliefs. I did like this as I don't want to be told the absolute truth on philosophical concepts.

Macauley describes a world that has vanished: a world that sees the British Empire as a dominant force, and that the English will travel, be well versed on the antiquities of the Middle East, but almost totally ignorant of the present (only a 2000 year discrepancy). But she does hint - the Empire is crumbling and her influence is waning. She also makes a comment on how the Levant felt about the British interference immediately after the 2nd World War - another interference now forgotten, but still felt.

The book is rich in concepts - xenophobia, empirical ignorance, fads in publishing (everyone is writing a book on Turkey), religion, missionary work and its affects on the locals, differing cultures and globalisation. All are treated in an idiosyncratic way, and shows a woman who was well read, highly educated and on the ball on contemporary issues.

This novel is also autobiographical. This comes as a surprise to the reader, but it sort of explains the very strange ending; which I will admit felt incongruous and about the only truly weak point in the novel (I don't wish to spoil your pleasure & is hinted or discussed in other reviews here).

I plan on reading more Macauley as a result of this novel. This book also have one of the most famous strange opening sentences: Take my camel, dear.

[ALLEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1956 author Rose Macaulay published her last novel, a delightfully loopy story of a maiden aunt, her Anglican vicar, her niece the narrator, their mentally disturbed camel and the occasional hangers-on who embark on a trip into the remoter parts of the Middle East in search of ancient architecture and risk incursion into the Soviet Union. Engaging semi-satire, partly autobiographical, opened up by occasional bursts of grace, and blissfully lacking in "cute." In fact, Macaulay's prose "sells" the story with its deep-down integrity no matter how silly the characters or sillier the circumstances they face. I know of no other book quite like THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND and while not everyone will like it as much as I do, it's definitely worth checking out.

I'm very grateful to the New York Review of Books for making this an NYRB book.


from the book:
"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The camel, a white Arabian Dhalur from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe, had been a parting present . . . I always thought it to my aunt's credit that, in view of the camel's provenance, she had not named it Zenobia, Longinus or Aurelian, as lesser women would have done; she had, instead, in a distant voice, always called it my camel, or the camel.
(p. 3)

[Karen·]

I didn't howl, no, but I certainly snorted in quite a few places.

Yes, it is funny and absurd and all over the place and skewers travel books and travel writers and publishing and the press and spying and the iron curtain (Burgess and Maclean) and it's incredibly erudite too, with Xenophon and the Euxine Sea and Priam and Hecuba and translators of the Classics and people travelling round these ancient places with an ancient guidebook in their hand and only seeing what they already know, and the snobbism (isn't snobbism a word?) of people who think that Venice is 'spoilt', which basically means that there are just far too many vulgar tourists there (with Lonely Planet rather than Arrian of Nicomedia, I suppose), but we're not vulgar, no, because we're travellers and we're writing a book about Something Serious, yes, and there is a chess-playing, car-driving ape called Suliman, it has all those things as well as having narrator whose faux-naive voice stops it from being twee, which it so easily could be, but isn't, so what, in that clichéd phrase, dear girl, what is there not to love?

All the bleeding religion, that's what's not to love. Because Laurie is 'Christ-haunted' as Flannery O'Connor put it, or rather not so much Christ-haunted as religion-haunted. She has a brand of 'flimsy and broken-backed but incurable religion'. So there's an awful lot about religion, because rather than being glad to be shot of the whole useless baggage, Laurie is a bit obsessed with getting back into the fabled city shimmering on a far horizon. Poor girl still believes that "at the city's heart lie the pattern and the hard core, and these I can never make my own: they are too far outside my range."

They were never even anywhere near mine.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truthfully, two 5 stars in one week!! THANK YOU, GR friends- and both from genre less visited.

An absolute masterpiece. OMG, why is it so rare that this level of wit, erudite comparison and pure exuberance can be filtered into less than 300 (277)pages within the last 50 years?

Well- no review or synopsis here of plot because others on this page have done it better. But this travel covers not just Turkey and other countries in the Mideast (early 1950's) but also discourse and depth of comparison and relationship to LARGE chunks of Western Civilization's history/philosophy/religion/tribal identity- you name it. From the Greeks onwards- definitions of the soul and conscience and our logic over our love. And even to the questions of which, if any, animals have souls. And of course the Christian eyes on the state of the Moslem woman folk met. Amidst such glorious tales of humor and descriptive nature.

But the straight form of long run on sentences with hardly a paragraph indent! You would think that a detriment. No, the whirl enhances and it enlarges the emotion.

Reading a few other post reviews after finishing this book, I was rather flummoxed by the level of judgment against Laurie's (no spoiler here) let's say- the mistake or outcome at the very end of the book. And also at the adjectives used to describe the organized religion dogma inclusions of length and other human religious FAITH contexts within this novel of The Towers of Trebizond.

It's the very dichotomy of Laurie's self-described condition. Within BOTH categories. Is "the problem" from within her own soul's belief ability or is it within organizational entity of Church itself- its authoritative practice. Not a pejorative issue against Laurie as an individual person at all. Tragedy happens. Humans are forever distracted and flawed. They have temperaments and they do make mistakes. It is in the very nature of being human. There is no total attention perfection- never completely.

But the fun in this book! And the serendipity sneakiness! And the physical and communicative obstacles to surmount!

So glad I had so many years in Roman Catholic schools from the 1950's onward, so I could chew the full bite of the apple on this one. And yet I still had to look up at least 4 or 5 different new English words, at that, during this read.

Absolutely delightful. Surely in the top 10 I will have read in 2014, although it is only April. And that first sentence is not the only great quote.

[Jacob Sebæk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Towers of Trebizond doesn´t seem much from faraway, faraway being 62 years ago.

However, the clichés of British eccentricity does tower quite a lot.

I admit you would probably find it more entertaining if you are more into the fine art of distinguishing between the branches of the Anglican tree and take a delight in lashing out at the Moslem community and the Billy-Grahamnists for not seeing the true light of the British god.

A roman à clef, where crisis of faith and doubts about the moral consequences of being in a relationship with a married man are the main themes - though wrapped in a travelogue from Turkey and The Levant.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes bordering the boring, and trust me, once you have used a camel as means of transportation you stop finding them charming in any way.

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

That's it. This book has usurped all my top ten and is now and will possibly forever be, my favorite book.

In a book quirky, comic, and tragic, a woman travels through Turkey (by camel and jeep) with her adventurous zealous Aunt Dot who, enabled by the Anglican Missions society, has a vision of emancipating Turkish women from their Muslim enslavement by tempting them with the freedoms of the Modern West and the Anglican church (hats, tea parties, education etc.) They are joined by the septuagenarian Father Chantry-Pigg,who dreams of converting Muslim heathens to the warm bosom of Christianity with his High Church relics and simultaneously discovering those long lost Byzantines (Greek; Christian) in the heart of the new secular state of Turkey (Muslim usurpers of Byzantium).

The narrator records the travelers movements, the camel's rascally temperament, the landscape, the culture, the food, the Russian spies, humoring the ridiculous efforts of her aunt and Father Hugh. Her doubts about her inherited faith make her moments of illumination insightful and never pious. She is a woman who cannot escape her connection to the Church, but also cannot escape her estrangement from it.

Religious history and rituals, travel, history, myth, romance, despair, frisky camels - this book has it all. It is an entertaining romp, funny, insightful, and deeply sad. There can be no better combination.

[Renata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this humorous, warmly satirical, adventure-travel novel years ago and was just reminded of its pleasures as I began a reread of the authors collection of essays appropriately titled Personal Pleasures. Certainly high up on that list should be one titled On Rereading of Favorite Books. If Rose Macaulay were still with us today, her line from the essay Booksellers Catalogues would be a reflection on the pleasures of Good Reads: "To Read these catalogues is like drinking wine in the middle of the morning; it elevates one into that state of felicitous intoxication in which one feels capable of anything. I must control myself, and not write to booksellers in haste ..." Or, for me, not keep adding to my towering TBR list!!! "In short, I am sober again. But I am glad I was drunk"

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those mid-century 'classic' British novels that is still cherished by devotees of the period, but not particularly well-known now - except for, perhaps, its famous opening line: "'Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.'" It took a while for me to fall in love with it, but fall in love I did. I would actually give is 4.5 stars . . . only withholding that last half of a star because there is something in its tone (rather arch) which lessened the emotional intensity of it.

By the first chapter, the author has managed to discuss camels, 500 years of Anglican church history and fishing - all of which are integral to the novel's plot. It's difficult to say what the novel is, exactly, because it's part travelogue and part moral journey (which reminded me, although the tone is completely different, of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair). The premise of the plot is an expedition into Turkey and other countries of the Levant for the purpose of religious conversion of the Muslim 'natives' for Christianity. But really, one gets the feeling that the main characters are there mostly to have exotic larks. Aunt Dot - doughty adventurer, feminist and staunch Anglican - has joined forces with Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, the Turkish feminist Dr. Halide and the narrator Laurie, but the odd little group are only loosely united in their belief systems, and soon become unstuck. Much of the novel is about Laurie's solo journey, which (literally) winds along the Turkish coastline into Syria, Jordan and Israel and (figuratively) is a spiritual journey.

At first, the novel seems to be about a particular sort of English person (upper middle-class, well-educated in the classics, stricken by wanderlust) whose goal in life seems to be one of having adventures in any country other than England. The trio of Aunt Dot, Father Hugh and Laurie are all well-educated in the classical world, and they are there more to observe and admire; the conversion part seems to be secondary. (I was also reminded of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View.). There is also a running joke about their desire to get a book out of their adventures, and how the entire area is overrun by missionaries, writer and spies. It all takes place in a vague sort of post-war (II) period, but except for allusions to the Soviet Curtain - which plays a role in the storyline - it feels almost 19th century. Throughout, the tone is deceptively light. It's consistently humorous, but not with the sort of humour that makes you want to laugh.

One of the pecularities of the novel is that one is never entirely sure if Laurie - the narrator and protagonist - is male or female. At first, I though female, and then I definitely thought male. And then at the end of the novel I thought female again, but I wasn't positive. The author carefully avoids using any kind of pronouns, and then is also the matter of names: Laurie's lover is called Vere, and both names are completely gender-neutral. The novel is meant to be based in large part on the author's life - not only her family background, but also her ambilvalent relationship with her own religious faith, and the long affair she had with Gerald O'Donovan (a former Jesuit preast and married man). Biography would suggest that Laurie was female, but in fact the novel seems more plausible with a male narrator - partly because it seems unlikely for a young women to be travelling alone in that part of the world. Also, the character just seemed male to me in terms of behaviour and mannerisms. I cannot help but think that Macauley made this all deliberately vague, but I cannot recall any book I've ever read in which the sex of the protagonist wasn't clear and obvious.

This is definitely one of those novels that as soon as I finished I felt quite tempted to start again from the beginning. There are such beautiful descriptions of scenery and history that I wanted to set on my own expedition of the Levant, and I felt horribly ignorant about that part of the world and was frequently interrupting my own reading to look things up. But really, the heart of the novel is about faith and belief and what it means to be human. I felt quite moved by certain passages - for instance, when Laurie talks about how the desire to be morally good - and the surprising ending of the novel was shattering. Although the narrator's voice never becomes earnest or serious, there is actually a great deal of philosophical depth to Laurie's journey. I also found myself thinking quite a lot about the rise and fall of human civilisations and the ancient clash between the Muslim and Christian world - and then relating them to present day struggles. Although it doesn't 'read' as modern at all, it felt surprisingly relevant.

[Daisy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t like travel writing, I never read travel writing so I can only assume I had had a break with my own personality when I added this to my ‘to read’ list. This was even worse than travel writing as it was a fictionalised piece of travel writing.
My god was it boring.
Nothing happened over the course of 250 pages.
Allegedly it was about a young woman Laurie who travels to Turkey with her Aunt Dot and an Anglican vicar Father Chantry-Pigg. Dot is supposed to be interested in women’s rights but that interest is confined to speaking to a few local women while chin-stroking in the same way that BBC reporters do when they go to a ‘deprived’ area and use their public school education to feign concern and empathy with their interviewees. Father Chantry-Pigg is out to convert.
Less than halfway through these two go missing from the narrative after sneaking into Russia and the rest of the book is taken up with the even duller Laurie who we follow on her journey to meet her lover as he docks in Turkey for a few days amid his glamourous holiday on board a superyacht (I just kept thinking of Philip Green and thinking I’m not sure I would travel 3 stops on the W14 let alone trek on a camel for a week for him). Her lover is married and so this is an illicit meeting but again so devoid of passion or interest that it could serve as a poster for the sexual continence brigade.
Part of the journey is made on a camel that is always described using various synonyms of mad (although it never does anything to warrant this description). Halfway through Macauley seems to lose interest in her own book, or maybe realises that most people wouldn’t get that far, and just uses insane. Repeatedly.
An accomplishment of writing so much of nothing.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the surface, this is a delightfully funny and quirky novel. The protagonist, Laurie, has joined her indomitable aunt Dot on an Anglican proselytizing mission to Turkey. Aunt Dot especially wants to show the oppressed Turkish women how much Christianity can do for them. Laurie herself has one foot in and one foot out of the Anglican church and she sways nearer to and farther from the Church throughout the novel in a fascinating way. There are other eccentrics along for the ride including Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, aunt Dot's High Church Anglican cleric buddy. Oh, and the camel, of course. The camel is an objective correlative for something, but I can't decide if it's for Laurie or for the mission as a whole. Maybe both?

The book is also part travelogue and part classical study, and I wish I knew so much more about the history and mythology and literature of the Mediterranean and the Middle East like Macaulay clearly did. I know there is a lot I missed. Thankfully the Scriptural references are known to me, though I wasn't always sure what they meant in the context of the novel.

Under the surface, this book is complex and layered and mixes comedy and tragedy in a brilliant way. This is the kind of book that begs re-reading and buddy reading too. Macaulay herself was a brilliant scholar and writer and it shows. The writing is so well crafted that it seems effortless to read. Macaulay was also an Anglican with varying levels of devoutness. Her observations through Laurie about Scripture and sin and how place affected early Christianity are insightful, and I often had a pencil hovering above the library book pages, desperate to underline. (Needless to say I'll be buying my own copy.)

I would put this novel alongside the Catholic novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. All three novelists understood personally what it meant to doubt and yet still be held within the gracious arms of the Church; their novels likewise explore the human heart: what makes the heart hard towards God, what softens it, and how even those who stumble and drag themselves into the Church find there is always space for them.

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply outrageous. No author could write this today. Its satire is mercilessly funny and dangerous. Laurie, Dorothea Ffoulkes-Corbett (otherwise Aunt Dot), and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg set off for Trebizond to emancipate women. Christianity and Islam are pilloried from a Humanist perspective as the story progresses. The novel slumps halfway through into travelogue, but picks up quickly, and ends as triumphant grand farce.. Originally. Macaulay was published by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press and Woolf was scathing about her "Eunuch" talents. A touch of authorial jealousy her. Macaulay is a one-off and a learned one-off! It is a long time since I have chuckled so much

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fairly entertaining novel, written in a droll and always informative manner. The framework is a travel narrative, which was very enjoyable, and within that framework, the author used the narrative to comment on the state of the Church of England and the efforts to evangelize in a predominantly Muslim region, which also included contact with other Christian denominations. Beyond that, the narrator is struggling with her attraction to High Church Anglicanism specifically, and Christianity in general, as she travels with her eccentric aunt to Turkey, and around the Black Sea region.

The book is well written, with enough information and plot to drive the narrative forward. The characters are all well developed, and the dry humor works very well. I was also gratified that Christianity is also a character in the story, and one portrayed as an objective good, and that didn’t overwhelm the story. The ending was rather a surprise, and when I read about the author after I had finished, I can see where the book and ending is almost a mirror of the author’s life. This was an entertaining read and while I’m probably too picky about the fiction I read, I can think of many of my GR friends who would thoroughly enjoy this.

[Mitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because it was a humorous fictionalized trip to Turkey (where I've been) on the part of the author, along with her eccentric aunt and a camel. What could go wrong?

Well, this: the book was overloaded with references to esoteric religious references (Anglican, High Church, Low Church, Roman Catholic, etc, etc, etc...) that were mainly meant to show how ridiculous they were. Unless you were an expert in these, the semi-humorous/semi-serious religious arguments went flat in short order. And they kept right on coming.

Some of this was clever, funny and enjoyable... and then~

The plot and the book both ended with a tragedy linked to the narrator's pettiness. It's actually pretty horrible and I am not sure why the author chose to do this.

I cannot think of any personal acquaintance I'd recommend this book to.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is so English I was halfway through before I realized the person she was talking about was her illicit male lover and not another old lady.

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have camel, will travel

Not having read or heard about THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND before, I was confused when I began, as to whether this was a novel or a travel book. Actually, it's a novel masquerading as a travel book or would that be the other way round?........hmm. Clever idea in any case.
The female narrator goes off on a trip to Turkey with eccentric Aunt Dot and a BYO camel, a curmudgeonly retired Anglican clergyman, unfortunately for travel in Islamic lands named Chantry-Pigg, and a Turkish lady who has converted to the Church of England. An odd time is had by all. They meet various English and Turkish characters, visit ruins, and Aunt Dot and the clergyman investigate the possibility of converting the Turks to Anglicanism. Suddenly, the ever-cheerful Aunt Dot and the Rev disappear, probably into Soviet Armenia. The narrator takes over the camel and continues the trip alone for the rest of the book, hoping to meet her married lover somewhere on the Mediterranean, if the camel can get her there. On the way she often muses on the romance of ancient history, adultery, and Church of England doctrines. The sections on adultery are not long, but very perceptive. The part on moral philosophy, Church of England doctrine and various arcane disputes in the Church can be skipped by those with less than a sterling interest in such topics, but the questions raised in the narrator's mind contain eternal questions asked by those who search for belief and understanding.

The author writes very well and with the old-style, dry British humor. The descriptions of Turkey's Black Sea coast and some other parts of the Levant are fine. Though some of the portraits of local characters tend to border on caricature, the same can be said of some of the British characters too, so fair enough. A novel in which an ape can drive cars and do a multitude of other useful tasks is not one which must be taken literally ! In case a split-identity, novel-cum-travelogue intrigues you (with a bit of mystery and a love story thrown in),get hold of this book somehow. I won't say it is one of the 20th century's great books, but it's thoughtful, well-constructed, and sensitive.

[Laurel Kane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read. I was supposed to read this book for a literature class i took at UCLA last summer, but didn't quite get to it. Macaulay writes in that British we're-all-crazy-and-kooky-and-we-think-it's-normal-and don't-realize-it's-actually-hysterical kind of way. At some points I was laughing out loud (teaching the monkey how to drive Aunt Dot's car!). The characters' names alone were humorous(Father Chantry-Pigg). The end, however, is devastating, but made me like the book even more because I didn't realize that I actually cared for Laurie until tragedy struck.

It was also incredibly interesting to read about their exploits traveling around in early 20th century Turkey. Aunt Dot is convinced that the Muslim women just need to be shown how "backwards" their way of life is (via the Church of England). The women will then have no choice but to become enlightened and cast off the religion and traditions that have oppressed them for so long. This book was written almost 60 years ago and there are still many people in the Western world who think this way! I do appreciate that Laurie then later talks about how she feels its "rude" to go into another country and attempt to convert the natives away from their own traditions.

I definitely recommend this book, especially to those who have been reading more modern novels about women in the Middle East (Three cups of Tea, etc.).

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first question that arises is how to classify this bizarre book: Travelogue? Farce? Morality play? Autofiction? Romantic reverie of a long lost world? All/none of the above? In view of the opening line, surely British silly-ass comedy (à la P. G. Wodehouse) surely comes to mind.
And yet, and yet …
How does one account for the shockingly abrupt shift in tone in the final chapter? Rose Macaulay was obviously a writer deeply aware of the fuzzy line between comedy and tragedy; a careful read of this apparently ludicrous road story reveals the opposite mask peeking around the corners of the Byzantine ruins that occupy so much of the narrator’s attention:
Then, between sleeping and waking, there rose before me a vision of Trebizond: not Trebizond as I had seen it, but the Trebizond of the world’s dreams, of my own dreams, shining towers and domes shimmering on a far horizon, yet close at hand, luminously enspelled in the most fantastic unreality, yet the only reality, a walled and gated city, magic and mystical, standing beyond my reach yet I had to be inside, an alien wanderer yet at home, held in the magic enchantment …
Her visions of those magnificent towers keep having to shoulder aside a nagging personal issue that she treats flippantly — suggesting that it’s a lot more troubling than she pretends. Perhaps that is why Macaulay chose to dress up the story in badinage, sending up the sheer silliness of a collection of Anglicans, Grahamites and other assorted would-be missionaries traipsing around Asia Minor seeking to convert and “liberate” Muslim women …. freeing them to wear hats!
Anyway, regardless of whatever Macaulay’s serious purpose may have been, she left us with an otherwise delightful bit of nonsense. There’s scarcely a page that doesn’t elicit at least a chuckle if not an outright belly laugh. And though her Anglican colleagues occupy center stage, she’s gleefully even-handed, poking fun at the mindless rituals, odd practices and baffling conceits of religions in general — observing, for example those sects that Americans have, that are difficult for English people to grasp …. when sects arrive in America, they multiply like rabbits in Australia …. and this is said to be on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the deep south and in California, where sects breed best.
As is the case with any really good humor, there’s just enough of a tinge of truth in her nonsense to make it compelling.

[Blaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't agree at all with the readers and critics who rate this as her best work. The run on style is tiresome and the combination of mild satire/humour, social commentary, travelogue, and the arguments about the virtues of the Anglican Church versus the many others were of limited interest to me. I missed the conflict between the civilised, wiser older woman and the young savage that had driven the two earlier works of hers I had enjoyed: Crewe Train and The World My Wilderness and and I found that the descriptions of the classical ruins in Turkey were less meaningful (to me) than the descriptions of postwar ruins of London described in The World My Wilderness. But, I am a London resident, not a classicist or an archeologist, and in the end much of the work must also be seen in the light of the last few pages. Still, the subjective enjoyment of much of the work does count for a lot, in my book.

But, I did think the ending was sincere and well done and it gave some meaning to Laurie's earlier meditations and meanderings and her gravitation toward the fantasies induced by the green potion given to her by her Trebizondian Greek sorcerer.

[Heidi'sbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

What the heck is up with the ending????

I was intrigued by the premise of this book. A humorous trip through Turkey on a camel with interesting characters along the way. I would love to travel to Turkey at some point in the future. The book spends a lot of time talking about High Church and low Church Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Billy Grahamites along with the Byzantine Church. Aunt Dot and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg go on the trip to spread the word of Christianity, and Aunt Dot wants to emancipate women in the Muslim country. However, the book has very little of spreading the word and a lot of criticizing the church. After all, a priest with the last name of Pigg wouldn't get very far spreading the Word in a Muslim country.

In the end the book is an anthology on religion. Indeed the Towers of Trebizond and the ruins of the Byzantine Church are a picture of the church in general.

"The Church is like a great empire on its way out, that holds its subjects by poetic force, its fantastic beauty heightened by insecurity; one sees it at times like a Desiderio fantasy of pinnacles and towers, luminous with unearthly light, rocking on their foundations as if about to crash ruining in decadence and disaster into the dark sea that steals up, already lapping and whispering at the marble quays. Yet though for ever reeling, the towers do not fall: they seem held in some strong enchantment, some luminous spell, fixed for ever in the imagination, the gleaming, infrangible, so improbable as to be all but impossible, walled kingdom of the infrangible God. "

The humor in the book is decidedly British. The writing is beautiful and the vocabulary incredible. There is a lot of name dropping of historical figures. I don't think this book would appeal to most modern readers. Especially with that ending.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dame Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond is a highly eccentric novel set mostly in Turkey and the Holy Land. It tells of a trip via camel and jeep through Northeast Turkey. Midway through the journey, Aunt Dot (Dorothy ffoulkes-Corbett) and the Rev. Hugh Chantry-Pigg cross the Russian border with the intention of visiting Armenian churches and drinking mare's milk on the steppes of Tartary. They are taken in hand by the Soviet authorities and assumed to be spies.

The attention turns to Laurie, Aunt Dot's niece, who must travel by herself on Dot's racing camel west to rendezvous with her lover, Vere, at Alexandretta. At times, this book is as much a travelogue as a work of fiction. Throughout, it sparkles with wit, including Laurie's meditation on her lax Anglican faith:

Then I thought, the Church is like a great empire on its way out, that holds its subjects by poetic force, its fantastic beauty heightened by insecurity; one sees it at times like a Desiderio fantasy of pinnacles and towers, luminous with unearthly light, rocking on their foundations as if about to crash ruining in decadence and disaster into the dark sea that steals up, already lapping and whispering at the marble quays. Yet, though for ever reeling, the towers do not fall: they seem held in some strong enchantment, some luminous spell, fixed for ever in the imagination, the gleaming, infrangible, so improbable as to be all but impossible, walled kingdom of the infrangible God.

At the end, a strange accident occurs which sets the ending off on an altogether different track than the rest of the novel -- one that is surprisingly somber.

Still, for over 95% of its length, The Towers of Trebizond is a delightful book.

[Whitaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is no Under the Tuscan Sun or Riding the Iron Rooster. It is not a travel narrative with breathless or sardonic descriptions of a land and its people. It is, instead, a personal meditation on religion and love loosely based on a period of time that Rose Macaulay spent in Turkey.

She was, at that time, having an affair with a married man, a situation which clashed fiercely with her Anglican beliefs. Her love and guilt are recounted with typical English understatement and detachment. For example, in one episode recounted in the book, she takes on a week-long journey on camel-back to meet up with her lover on the coast of Turkey. She comes down with a fever during the journey but soldiers on regardless. This is recounted with a dry and wry stoicism:

Very soon I began feeling dizzy and strange, and when I came to I was still on the camel but in a coma, and this was the Turkey sickness, or possibly it was the camel sickness, and one made the other worse...I wished I had kept a few of aunt Dot's bottles and pills in case any of them were good for the Turkey sickness, but the only bottle I had was the green potion I had got from the Greek sorcerer in Trebizond.

Her account of this troubled period in her life is made all the more moving because of her steadfast refusal to pity herself. Readers looking for insights into Turkey, however, should look elsewhere.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

The first chapter or so, in which the family background of Aunt Dot is sent up so hilariously, was an absolute and utter delight. As soon as the group of eccentric Brits begin their tour of Turkey, however, I was put off by the headache-inducing density of the cultural and historical references, and most of all by the superior, smug—indeed, racist—tone of the humor. British satire works best when it pokes at British folks and culture; it quickly becomes odious when outwardly directed.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose Macaulay was recommended to me as a great minor author by Mr. Thomas Banks of The Literary Life Podcast. Though fiction this book could also be called a travel logue and a quite enjoyable one at that. It is also deeply satirical and one of those books which would grow funnier with understanding.
A bit Babylon Bee when it comes to the CofE but lovingly so. At times, it is positively Wodehousian although it ends with more pathos.
#202for20 Satire or minor author