The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That quote often appears on lists of best opening lines, but it might be as far as most people get into The Towers of Trebizond (1956) by Rose Macaulay. She hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion completely, as a handful of her novels remain in print, but it’s fair to say that the average person in the street won’t be able to tell you a lot about her. She’s an author I love, but I’ve had very mixed success with her novels. At the top of the tree are Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, which are very funny while also being incisively insightful about mid-century society. At the bottom is the turgid Staying With Relations. The much-feted The World My Wilderness fell in the middle for me, being very well observed but lacking the humour she does so well.

Where would The Towers of Trebizond fall on my list? It’s among her best known, but various red flags worried me – since I don’t particularly enjoy books set in countries that the author isn’t from, and I particularly don’t get on with travel books. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with this one… but I made my book group read it, so that I’d find out!

Laurie is the narrator and, for much of the book, she details the journey she takes from Istanbul to Trebizond, along with Aunt Dot (Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) and her friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Dot is there to improve the lot of women, while Father Hugh is hoping to convert the masses to his particular brand of High Anglicanism. Somewhere along the way, Dot and Hugh go missing – possibly to Jerusalem, possibly to Russia – and rumour spreads that they are spies.

Macaulay apparently referred to the writing as a ‘rather goofy, rambling prose style’, and I can see why. The tone is often a little detached, curious, and wry – with the same sort of lengthy, relatively unpunctuated sentences that make Barbara Comyns’ style so quirky. Here’s an example:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

The main topics she addresses are faith (and distinctions between different denominations), history, and travel. Much of the book is her musings on these, with plenty of contributions for her companions while they’re about. I think it’s largely commendable for how impressively of-a-piece it is. She does not let up this style – it is consistently well done and totally all-encompassing. I guess it’s then just a question of whether or not you like this style.

While they were travelling around, I found it all a bit muddy. I couldn’t really distinguish the different places they were going, and I certainly found the interpersonal bits much more interesting than her reflections on the places she was seeing. Without anything concrete to hang onto, it was all a bit – well, the most fitting word I can think of is, again, muddy.

I could still definitely appreciate the skill that went into the creation of this portrait, and I did find a lot of it funny. Being a Christian and having been brought up in an Anglican church, I did enjoy some of the discussions of faith – though I always find that it’s non-Christians who find denominations so fascinating, and we’re happy just to do our best to follow Jesus. Macaulay has a wonderfully arch tone, and the faux matter-of-fact style did work – I just wish she’d set it in England. (The section I found funniest was when she was reflecting on having often used a line from her phrasebook about not speaking Turkish, only to discover later that she’d mixed up lines and was actually asking to speak to a Mr. Prorum, or something like that – who did turn up at one point, nonplussed.)

And, indeed, the sections of the novel I liked best were at the end, when she has turned to the UK. There is a very odd sidestep into her trying to raise a chimp – complete with driving lessons – that I thought was marvellous. In fact, having now been to book group, it was one of those times when discussing it made me like it more – reflecting on all the funny scenes and the unusual way Macaulay presents them. It’s all an impressive achievement, for the way in which it is sustained, if nothing else – and, while it doesn’t quite rival my favourite Macaulays for me, I can see why other readers would consider this her masterpiece.