The Towers of Trebizond

It's always good to see an old favorite returned to print after many years. This always helps a new generation of readers to enjoy some writing that interested their previous generation. This book is touted as a very funny work, but I didn't think that it was all that humorous, at least to my mind. That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book, because I did, very much. The characters were well-drawn, and the travelogue portion of the work was first-rate. I thought of the book as more of a meditation on religion and its meaning to various people in the story, and I just loved the word pictures that the author painted on almost every page! Humor is in the mind of the beholder, and some of the book was indeed humorous; not in a laugh out loud vein, but rather in a quiet chuckling way. The work shows its age a bit, being almost 50 years old, but that doesn't make any diference in the story line. This is a good book to read, whatever your reason, and I highly recommend it.

An important book: this is Macaulay's last novel and one in which she reveals more of her own life, usually kept very private and guarded. Like the narrator, Macaulay carried on an affair with a married man for many years. At the time she wrote this book, she had returned to the Church of England; she herself, like Laurie (the narrator) in the novel, is inclined to the Catholic expression of that tradition. This book is a wonder: part travelogue, part comedy, it is also, remarkably, a serious commentary on faith and doubt. It deals with the difficulties, both moral and intellectual, entailed in being a Christian in today's modern world, with both church and society being what they are. This book, then, will both entertain you and make you think. For students of the English theologian Austin Farrer, I'd say that Laurie's situation in this book is an effective representation of what Farrer means by "initial faith": attracted but still divided, not ready to give full commitment to what the church stands for.

Rose Macaulay's TOWERS OF TREBIZOND is unlike any other novel ever written. Basically a kind of travelogue of the narrator's travels through the Levant with her eccentric Aunt Dot, the smug Anglican Reverend Chantry-Pigg, and Aunt Dot's crazy camel (an important character in its own right), the novel comes to encompass much more: a meditation on East and West, a study of the contrasts between diffeerent forms of religion, and a very searching analysis of the need for religion in human experience. It's the kind of book you don't want to end, and even when it becomes somewhat wild and unbelievably allegorical (such as when the narrator trains an ape she acquires in Turkey to drive a car late in the work) you stay with it. It's the kind of book you can dip in again and again throughout your life: it works as well in bits and epigrams as it does as a sustained narrative.

More than 20 years ago I first read this book.. I found it in the library in my home town, Utrecht, The Netherlands. The first sentence: "`Take my camel dear', said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass", captivated me, and I couldn't stop reading. They had to send me home (with the book) when the library closed, several hours later. I read the book several times then. I tried to find it in the bookshops, but it seemed not to be avalilable. I got it from the library again and made a cover-to-cover photocopy. Later on I lost the photocopy (my first wife insisted that she kept it when we divorced). So when, on a visit to Cincinnati, I finally found it again in one of the bookstores, I was the happiest person in the world. It is a magnificent book. It tells the story of a British (it is a very British book) woman, probably around 35 years old, traveling in Turkey, and Syria and Lebanon, with her aunt and a clergyman. It is as ironic as the British can be, and it gives some profound insights into the crooked world of Anglican High Church clergy. But it also is a book about love, and about the struggle when a woman who is religious in principle, falls into illegitimate love with a married man. It's a book about the choices we have in life (two of the characters choose to vanish into the Soviet Union, which must have been a brave thing to write about in England in the fifties). It is also one of the most tender books that I know: there are no villains in this book, just loved ones that are slichtly off the tracks. Also, it portrais the protagonist as a writer/illustrator of travel books, which makes us realize that the book is about Rose MacAulay: a well-known writer of travel books about the Middle East. The way she describes the other writers-of-travel-books that roam the area is hilariously obnoxious (it's the only book I know that has somebody eaten by a shark in the Black Sea). Having read the book, which you SHOULD, you will want to know about the author. I can recommend the short introduction in `The world my wilderness', which has recently become available again as a Virago Modern Classic. There you can read about some of the real life things that found their way into `The towers of Trebizond'. With this information the book became even more dear to me. But only read this introduction after you have read the book itself! By the way, `The world my wilderness' is almost as captivating and tender and non-conventional as `The towers of Trebizond', be it slightly less accessible.