The Towers of Trebizond

An odd book that is equally concerned with High Church attitudes, the tradeoff between ethics and fulfillment in adultery, the pleasures of leisurely travel, and our relationship with our animal companions. Most frequently quite funny but veering occasionally and unexpectedly into piquant observations on the dissatisfactions of essential compromises.

This book is a marvel. Unless you are extremely learned in the Classics, Middle Eastern geography and history, Literature in general, the history and practices of the extremely high end of Anglicanism, fishing and the Soviet Union you will not understand everything in this book - I certainly don't. But it's like meeting someone charming, funny, urbane and a LOT smarter than you who nevertheless grabs your loyalty instantly because they're just so interesting. It's very funny, wistfully sad in parts, incredibly observant and thought provoking. It isn't long but it packs a huge amount in. Look out in particular for Mr Yorum Yorum, absinthe-fueled visions of Hittites, spontaneous singing when the BBC recording van rolls past and British show more spies strolling in the distance. A feast! show less

Most of this book takes the form of a travelogue in which a trio of upper-class British twits (for various degrees of twittishness) travels around mid-20thC Turkey to gauge the feasibility of converting the local women to High Church Anglicanism. There’s the no-nonsense, no-consideration Aunt, the self-congratulatory Priest, and the narrator, who thinks of herself as a characterless hanger-on, but who over the course of the book develops her snarkiness into some degree of coherence and thoughtfulness. Towards the end a little bit of sudden seriousness encroaches, but it isn’t too jarring.

Large parts of this book felt like they had almost been written to cater specifically to my tastes: they’re whimsical, colourful, indulge in the show more joys of largely obstacle-free travelling, and the characters are archaeology-obsessed know-it-alls who are over-educated in Classical European History and who enjoy their little discussions about random points of Christian theology. It’s all very cute and amiable, and the novelistic parts, lightweight as they are, do not interrupt the travelogue too much.

While the troupe of Brits are presented as too smug even to think of themselves as foreigners when travelling through another country, their twittishness is presented with a dollop of self-irony, and paired with a largely sympathetic portrayal of the people behind the class, a mixture that makes the whole thing much more palatable than it would otherwise have been.

All in all, an easily digestible, whimsical period piece: a pleasant and smooth read through a book that has no real pretensions to profundity. If my review has whetted your appetite, the book is probably for you; if not, it likely won’t be. show less

Classic comic British novels, from Three men in a boat and Zuleika Dobson to Lucky Jim, have a way of being a good deal funnier when you remember them than they are when you actually have them in front of you: The towers of Trebizond is a case in point. Coming back to it after a long time, I remembered all the ludicrous incidents involving the camel, the ape, Mr Yorum, and Father Chantry-Pigg, but I'd forgotten how sad and reflective it gets in the final chapters, as the narrator struggles to come to terms with religious faith. There's an incongruously late-Victorian feel to this part of the book: Matthew Arnold writing in the style of Nancy Mitford, perhaps. Very odd. But not much odder than late Evelyn Waugh, I suppose: probably it show more didn't seem quite so incongruous in the fifties. And of course there is a long tradition of self-mockery among Anglo-Catholics, continued in recent times by writers like A.N. Wilson.

The other part of the book also has its oddities: once Auntie Dot and the priest have been shunted off over the frontier, there are long stretches where we seem to lose track of the idea that this is a novel, and it reads more like a straightforward Robert-Byronish travel book. It does have rather a thirties feel to it, definitely: it seems odd when we are pulled back into the fifties by a mention of the Cold War or Burgess and MacLean.

Overall, I suspect that this is a better, more complex novel than it's often given credit for: certainly, it's much more than just an amiable send-up of English eccentrics abroad. show less

Very, very funny, but with a borderline non-sequitur turn to the depressing and macabre at the end. But very funny until then. If you have any sense, the camel will be your favorite character, or maybe the ape who learns to go to church.

So many people have professed their love for The Towers of Trebizond that I couldn’t help but choose it over several other 1956 books, despite having already read three other Rose Macaulay novels this year. Known by many people simply for its fabulous opening line:

“Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”

Well, if that isn’t enough to make you smile and to wish to carry on reading, I don’t what is. Macaulay is frequently wry as she sets about observing people in their various, sometimes ludicrous pursuits.

“Everyone had had the idea of starting for home early, so as to miss the crawl, but, since everyone had had the idea, no one missed the crawl.”

The novel show more follows the progress of a group of characters as they embark upon a journey from Istanbul to Trebizond. They are, Laurie – our narrator, her Aunt Dot (Dorothea Ffoulkes Corbett) and Dorothea’s friend, high Anglican priest Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Oh, and then there’s the camel. They are befriended by a Turkish woman doctor; Dr Halide, an ardent feminist with an interest in Anglicanism. Aunt Dot is set on converting and liberating the Turkish women she meets with Christianity and introduce them to the bathing hat.

This novel is a mix of things, part novel, part autobiographical travelogue and an exploration of religion. While Father Chantry-Pigg carries sacred relics around with him, Laurie muses on the complications of her love life. Along the way the trio meet British travel writers and witness the progress of Billy Graham on tour with the BBC. Macaulay does employ some typical British colonial stereotypes – though these things are put into the mouths of her characters and are fairly mild. Her characters are upper class English idiots – harmless enough and of a type – and I think she was poking gentle fun at them. Macaulay is a good observer of the Englishman/woman abroad – and here she is superb at portraying the noise and clamour of a Turkish harbour.

“The boats were filled mostly with steerage passengers who lived in Trebizond or were visiting relations there, and the women carried great bundles and sacks full of things, but the men carried suit-cases with sharp, square corners, which helped them very much in the struggle to get on and stay on the boats, for this was very violent and intense. More than one woman got shoved overboard into the sea during the struggle, and had to be dragged out by husbands and acquaintances, but one sank too deep and had to be left, for the boat-hooks could not reach her; all we saw were the apples out of her basket bobbing on the waves. I thought that women would not stand much chance in a shipwreck, and in the struggle for the boats many might fall in the sea and be forgotten, but the children would be saved all right, for Turks love their children, even the girls.”

Suddenly, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg disappear over the border into Russia – a task so impossible during these cold war days, that it is assumed they must have had help of a fairly sinister nature, and are declared spies, by almost everyone. A little anxious, though not unduly concerned Laurie is left alone in charge of the camel – on which she continues to travel.

She meets up briefly with her lover, enters into a wrangle over a manuscript with one of the British travel writers; David who has a habit of popping up every now and then, but at least can be relied on to buy dinner. She experiences a hallucinatory draught that she is given in exchange for food, sells camel rides along the road, encounters difficulty getting into Israel and then later meets her estranged mother in Jerusalem. It’s all wonderfully bonkers.

After all that travelling, eventually Laurie heads back to England, with an ape that she has picked up (as you do). Here, as settles back into normal English life, she is forever wrestling her Christian faith with her adulterous relationship with a married man. The camel and the ape suitably ensconced at the zoo but Laurie wonders whether or not she will ever see Aunt Dot and her priest ever again.

Overall, a really good read – my favourite Macaulay is still The World my Wilderness, but I loved the sense of place in this, the bizarre quirkiness of Macaulay’s story and her characters – make for a memorable novel. There is also a fabulously unexpected bit of drama at the end of the novel – which I won’t spoil for you – I do enjoy being taken by surprise. show less

This book grew on me as I read, as what seemed at first to be a somewhat comic, somewhat dated travel narrative turned into a complex and subtle novel of ideas, about religion, history, what it means to do right or wrong, love, loss, and the fate of empires. Macaulay is a marvelous and bitingly witty writer, weaving long, fascinating sentences that often wind up with surprise endings. Little bits of information scattered throughout the text end up coming together in revealing ways. The book contains a lot of classic and Anglican history, of the type that educated Britons of the first part of the 20th century would have known inside out, but that frequently sent me to Wikipedia.

The time is the early 1950s, and the novel follows the show more narrator, initially unnamed, as she accompanies her Aunt Dot, her aunt's camel, and her aunt's traveling companion, the Reverend the Honorable Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, on an expedition to Turkey where they have overlapping but divergent goals: leaving England, converting the Turks, liberating Turkish women, writing and illustrating books. (In fact, Macaulay is very funny about all the English people who travel places to write books about them.) Needless to say, complications ensue.

I have to admit that parts of the book, especially at the beginning, annoyed me, because they were so illustrative of prejudiced colonial attitudes. As I read more, and followed more of the thoughts of the narrator, I began to think, or hope, that she was making fun of these, but if not, they are a relic of a time and a place. There were also a couple of episodes that didn't quite seem to belong in the book, or at least I couldn't figure out why they were there.

Nonetheless, and despite the fact that this ultimately a mournful book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. show less