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?
“‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass’.” This wins as my favourite first line of any book I’ve read (so far, at least). “The Towers of Trebizond” was not what I expected — though, now I think of it, I am not quite sure what it was I expected. Let me think … well, for one thing, when I bought it, I thought it was nonfiction, which it is not; however, those who knew her say that much of Rose Macaulay’s own life is written into it, and that seems true. For another, the little I knew of the main character made me think that Aunt Dot would be like an English high-church version of Auntie Mame (another book and film I love). In fact, that was a superficial and not-too-accurate impression. Both aunties are bold, adventurous, over-the-top, and hilarious, and both are opportunists in their own ways. However, unlike Mame, Aunt Dot is at heart a high-minded and committed person with serious intentions in the world. And while “Trebizond” is a comedy, like Mame, it is also consistently philosophical and reflective, without being sentimental.Another expectation I had was that I had thought the story belonged to Aunt Dot, but it is her niece, Laurie, whose tale this is, and we see and hear all through her. So, I had expected a very funny autobiography of a slightly mad middle-aged English woman romping across Turkey on a camel and getting into all manner of mischief (this happens, to be sure), while her niece tags along in the sidekick role; but what I got, in the end, was much stiller and deeper than that. The quieter voice and more introverted experiences of Laurie are a kind of anchor to Dot’s hi-jinx, and yet, the relationship between the two is more complicated than that simple description can capture. Aunt Dot has a certainty and a solidity about herself and her place in the world that young Laurie admires, but cannot achieve and which she believes may forever elude her. The heart of the book is Laurie’s narrative, played against the backdrop of a grand and romantic vision of the Turkish coast as she gallops along it, alone with Dot’s camel. (I won’t spoil the plot by telling you how and why the two become separated, because it’s the best part of the tale.)The book, in topic and tone and sense of humour, reminds me of Barbara Pym’s writing (which is high praise). In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys Barbara Pym. “Trebizond” is also quite sad, in that way that Pym can be sometimes, too; but I must have been looking the other way as the plot went trotting past, because I failed to notice its heading towards a cliff until it had gone airborne. Still, everyone copes in the end, as one does when one is of a certain era and a certain class and a certain country. (I am still getting over it!)A side effect of having finished Macaulay’s book is that I find myself eager to travel around Turkey and Armenia, circa 1956, on a dashing and deranged camel. This is why I read, of course.
What do You think about The Towers Of Trebizond (2003)?
Oh, to be well read, well-bred and snootily, kookily English. The narrator, her camel-riding Aunt Dot and the stern relic hoarding Anglican Priest Father Chantry-Pigg tsk tsk in disapproval and reprobation throughout the gorgeous and mercurial lands of Turkey in the 1950s: a time when the Iron Curtain clanked ominously in the oleander and cypress scented winds and when the ghosts of Greek sorcerers would still sell you magic green bottles of certain liquids that could change you forever. Tedious government officials and secular inclusion-ism be damned,this band of snooty Brits is off to convert those rascally irrational Muslim Turks to the One True Faith, and so they grab their Superior White Camel, several copies of the Bible and of course their fishing poles, and head off to establish missions, sell the Muslim women on Christ and the freedoms of hat-wearing, and write their Turkey Book. Everyone else they know is writing a Turkey book. Why shouldn't they? I WANTED to dislike them. I TRIED not to care what happened next...but the narrator's dry, self-parodying cynicism seemed to contain these vulnerable little sprouts of inner revelation...dangerous epiphanies that have their roots in a spiritual world that no organized religion can completely contain... ...I should have seen what happens next but I didn't and this is where the author's true genius emerges and sparkles in the sunlight like silver beads on a belly dancer's dress. (Yes I just said that.) She was so entrancing that she put me completely in the head of a narrator who couldn't see what was right in front of her. It was right in front of me, too...except I was blinded by the despicable politically incorrect charms of the loopy Brits who tried to swoop in with their inexhaustible supply traveler's cheques, classical educations, important friends, chipping Byzantine frescoes and cud chewing camels....
—S.
"'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."This book has one of the best opening lines I've read, the antithesis of a Lytton-Bulwer.Its also a novel in the skeptical-Christian tradition. Macaulay (of those Macaulays) tells here of a High Anglican mission to Turkey in the 1950s competing with local Muslim traditions, "Billy Grahamites", and a Seventh-Day Adventist reunion on Mount Ararat in anticipation of a nuclear Holocaust. (How do the High Church missionaries know they are changing the culture? Less veils for women.) Macaulay has a great comic sense of timing and a strong ear for religious sentiments (whether comic or serious) and I highly recommend this lost classic to people who like Waugh, Chesterton or other of her contemporaries.
—Raully
Macaulay, Rose (1881-1958). THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND. (1956) *****.tThis was one of those novels that I had heard about, but never got around to reading. It’s back in print in a New York Review of Books edition, and well worth the read. Rose was a well-known writer and social figure in England – though less so in the U.S. – in her day. She was the author of thirty-five books, twenty-three of them novels. This novel was her last, published only two years before her death. She was related to Lord Macaulay, an important figure in British politics – especially India – and intellectual life. He was well-known for his History of England, which was – in my opinion – totally unreadable unless you were trying to cure insomnia. This novel covers a lot of ground. It is the story of a group of English tourists taking in the sights and culture of Turkey and the surrounding country. The driving force in this tour is Aunt Dot. Dot was well off and decided that she neeed to explore the conditions of women in Turkey and to somehow to something to improve them. She was travelling with her niece, Laurie, the narrator of the novel, and a clergyman, Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, a relatively high official of the C of E. His purpose was to see what other religious groups were doing in the regions to spread their beliefs so that he could better organize the Anglican efforts. Laurie was sort of the poor relation who was offered a chance to go with them. The first half of the book is dominated by the Aunt, Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett, who manages to bully her way through most of the existing red tape normally encountered in East Asian countries. Aunt Dot, however, was used to getting her own way. The novel spends a lot of time examining the doubts about religion in general and the Anglican variety in particular. Laurie is the main muser on this subject. Later in the book, Aunt Dot and the clergyman disappear over the frontier between Turkey and Russia, sparking an international incident that effectively removes them from the plot for a long time, but which sheds a lot of light on their respective personalities. There is a good dose of humor in this novel, too, lots of it centered on the varous native customs encountered, plus that met through the medium of their camel – the prime mover of their goods throughout their trek. There’s lots of good stuff in this book for everyone. I’m glad that this new edition has brought the book back for current readers. Highly recommended.
—Tony
