The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) | Rose Macaulay

The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) | Rose Macaulay | Take my camel, dear

books:

The Towers of Treb...

	The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) Rose Macaulay NYRB Classics, 2003 - 296 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

"'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.

for more information click here

Eccentric And Touching

The Towers of Trebizond might mislead a reader who picks it up into thinking it to be a standard travel account of a journey to Turkey and the Middle East in the 1950s. However, the famous first line "Take my camel, dear . . ." will soon warn that there is much much more to this hilarious, odd little novel.

Rose Macaulay uses as narrator the ambiguously named Laurie. Most people assume Laurie is a woman, and there is some internal evidence to substantiate this, but as other reviewers have pointed out, Laurie could just as well be a man, and in some ways, the story makes more sense if he is.

Regardless of Laurie's gender, the story revolves principally around her/his Aunt Dot, one of the great British eccentrics, and her escapades on a journey through Turkey and into the Soviet Union. Her adventures, and those of Laurie, the camel, a monkey, and various other assorted characters, are hilarious. At the same time, there is a sad note of wistfulness tand a sense of loss and deprivation that are not quite so easy to sort out.

Read The Towers of Trebizond and laugh, but you'll be pondering it in more solemn moments for a long time to come.

for more information click here

Take my camel, dear

I stumbled across Rose Macaulay while browsing through the "New York Review of Books Classics". It turns out that the Towers of Trebizond was a great hit in the UK and US back in the 1950's. I highly recommend taking a look at those wonderful reprints of older books. All praise to the New York Review of Books.

This book is a mostly hilarious sendup of conventional society (primarily British, but others do not escape unscathed) in the form of a travelogue and memoir of a youngish upper middle-class English woman who travels to Turkey with her Aunt Dot and their High Anglican minister Hugh Chantry-Pigg. A camel, Billy Graham sightings, and a disappearance into Soviet Russia are involved in this wonderfully witty tale. Macaulay also sprinkles some philosophy along the way and a sudden and sobering twist at the end.

By turns quirky, eccentric, funny, and thoughtful, The Towers of Trebizond is a nugget well worth rediscovery.

for more information click here

A Great--And Very Different--Read

*MILD SPOILERS*

This is a sneaky book. It starts off one way--as a comic recount of eccentric, genteelly arrogant Brits (the narrator's Aunt and a high-church Anglican priest) on a quixotic mission to convert and reform Turkey. As told by the crazy Aunt's niece (?), Turkey itself (and the Turks' reaction to the Brits) is beautifully evoked. Then, a hint here, a little more explication there, then a major plot twist as the Aunt and the Priest disappear into the Soviet Union, and the book evolves into a profound rumination on love and faith, and the conflicts the two can engender.

The story is always told in an arm's length, almost unemotional, way. And I think the last page of the book, on the "eternal dilemma" of searching for the City on the Hill is one of the most moving and profound pieces of writing I have ever read.

The book is also hilarious. There is more than one LOL moment, but my favorite is when the narrator from her (?) Turkish phrase book confuses, "I don't speak Turkish well," with "Can you connect me with Mr. Yorum"--and then is introduced to a Mr. Yorum.

Kudos to whomever it was that noted that the gender of the narrator is never clearly identified. One tends to assume it is female, from the voice of the book, yet when you look back, you really don't know. The ambiguity just adds one more layer to an already many-layered book.

I'd like to conclude by noting my thanks to New York Review Classics. I have read something like twenty of them now, none of which I would have heard of, much less read, without their publication through this series. The editors have done a magnificent job in bringing back to new and more-than-deserved life these forgotten classics.

for more information click here

Not just another "Turkey book"

Before Americans had their Disneyland, the British had the Levant. During the middle decades of the last century, tourists and students--along with would-be missionaries, spies, and archaeologists--traversed the highways and byways between Istanbul and Jerusalem, crawling the bazaars and historic sites of the former Ottoman Empire and treating the locals as if they were attendants in a playground. Rose Macaulay was one of those sightseers, and she sends up her friends, her fellow Brits, and herself (thinly disguised as the narrator Laurie) in this mocking, introspective novel.

The plethora of travelers in the Middle East spawned its own genre; many of Laurie's friends "are all writing their Turkey books." Even Laurie and her aunt Dot are planning to publish one: "The trouble with countries is that, once people begin travelling in them, and people have always been travelling in Turkey, they are apt to get over-written." The irony, of course, is that Macaulay's parody of those "Turkey books" is one of the few that have survived to the present day.

Macaulay's style features a persistent drollness and the use of intentionally circular run-on sentences that enhances the wit and hilarity of the first half of the book, when Laurie, her aunt Dot, the blinkered Father Chantry-Pigg, and Dot's partially insane camel (re-imported from its stable in London) run across their fellow compatriots (and Billy Graham) crisscrossing the region and writing (or plagiarizing) their Turkey books. But that same drollness and meandering style serves equally well for the novel's melancholy, brooding second half, after Dot and the priest "disappear," leaving Laurie with a mad camel and hardly any money.

The solitude forces Laurie to confront her inability to reconcile her religion and her adulterous affair with a married man (it is to his ship that Laurie takes herself when she is nearly out of money), and these reflections address the larger issue of whether the pleasures of life and adherence to faith might be mutually exclusive. She wonders too about the role of religion in modern life in general, even aside from her adultery (which makes her simultaneously happy and unhappy and which she has no doubt is wrong, yet which she can't break off). "Theology seems the only science which does not keep adapting its views and its manuals to new knowledge as it turns up." Yet she is drawn to the "towers" of the Anglican Church: "The fact that at present I cannot find my way into it does not lessen, but rather heightens, its spell."

Macaulay keeps a tight reign on the weightiness of these meditations and arguments; after one contentious debate with a Catholic, a non-believer, and several other attendants at a party, "they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another." And that, it seems, is her point: when it comes to religion, the joys of life itself constantly intrude. She offers no answers to the "eternal dilemma," and her doubts and wistfulness add unexpected depth to what might otherwise have been just another Turkey book.

for more information click here

It's witty and erudite

Macaulay's Towers is clever and generally a joy to read. A familiarity with classical near east history helps but is not absolutely necessary; an appreciation of strains of high church Christian theology is almost essential. I especially liked Aunt Dot, who appears in the bulk of the book. When she takes a sabbatical, I found my attention wandering; the fantastic bits with long camel rides and driving monkeys did not appeal to me. The underlying theme of the book deals with how ones religion is manifested in ones life, and the author's views are sophisticated. Much is made of interplays between traditional Christianity and Islam; evangelical Christianity makes a minor appearance, and a few basic issues of feminism are sprinkled throughout. The book does a fine job in identifying many of the troubles which continue to plague the Levant in the present era. Recommended.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

products you might be interested in