Published in 1956, Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond is a fascinating mixture of comic travelogue and melancholy reckoning with the problem of sin. The final chapter delivers a stinging shock that lingered in my mind a long while after, but at the beginning, it would be hard to imagine a more innocent story. The narrator, a young woman named Laurie, is accompanying her Aunt Dot on a missionary trip to Turkey. Aunt Dot’s specific goal is to convert the (she presumes) downtrodden women of Turkey into liberated Anglican women —of whom she herself presents a self-assured and even domineering example— and then to write a book about it. Unfortunately, apart from the highly-educated feminist Dr. Halide who travels with them, they seem to have difficulty finding any actual Turkish women, although as Laurie notes of her effusive aunt with her usual dry tone, “The less she saw of these women, the more she had to say about them.”
In the absence of their intended subjects, Laurie is left to sketch the humorous characters encountered on their trip, with particular attention to the behaviour and attitudes of their fellow English travellers. These include the stuffy relic-hunting clergyman Father Chantry-Pigg, who is Aunt Dot’s partner in missionary work; some cutthroat rival travel-writers; dozens of probable British spies bumbling around postwar Istanbul; and a ubiquitous B.B.C. recording van, the appearances of which become a running gag. “Reporters for the B.B.C. have such an extraordinary effect on the people they meet,” Aunt Dot complains, “wherever they go the natives sing. It seems so strange, they never do it when I am travelling.”
This stream of witty and self-deprecating observation is a delight to read. However, beneath it lies a story that is far from light-hearted, intertwining the complications of faith and ill-fated love. Even as Laurie helps her aunt and Father Chantry-Pigg to set up ad-hoc Anglican services in various public locations under the hostile or indifferent eyes of the Turkish residents, she herself is mourning her own estrangement from the church, the result of an affair with a married man whom she loves too much to give up. So, although she begins the book in a rather subordinate role as a chronicler for her eccentric and strong-willed aunt, Laurie’s struggle emerges as the central moral quandary of the book.
The depiction of Laurie’s spiritual desolation is understated, but stems from deeply personal circumstances. Like her main character, the author Rose Macaulay had been in a relationship with a man who was married with children, and she similarly refrained from taking communion during her adulterous relationship. The couple had been together for more than twenty years when they were in a car accident —in which Macaulay was the driver— that left her lover with a serious head injury from which he never fully recovered. These events are echoed in The Towers of Trebizond by an incident of shocking violence that ultimately shatters the easygoing tone built up throughout the previous two hundred and fifty pages. For Macaulay, more than a decade would pass after her lover’s death before she fully returned to the Church. The Towers of Trebizond was published a few years after her spiritual reconciliation.
Reflections on the Church of England, with all the paradox, violence, and grace that make up its history, are woven throughout the novel. There is a constant insistence, which seems particularly Anglican, that it is the beauty of ritual rather than the rightness of doctrine that brings us closer to God. But Macaulay is also willing to poke gentle fun at her church’s famed religious tolerance when Aunt Dot admonishes, “You must never forget, Laurie, that dissenters are often excellent Christian people... Though of course you must always remember that we are right.”
Though the Anglican Church may be, as Laurie describes it, more “elastic” than other denominations, she nevertheless feels that she is outside of it. Her predicament is especially lonely, not only because of the necessary secrecy around her relationship, but also because most people in her circle have abandoned the framework of thought that would have enabled them to grapple with this kind of problem. As Laurie puts it, people used to talk freely about their own individual virtue, but now “You can say you would like to be a good writer, or painter, or architect, or swimmer, or carpenter, or cook, or actor, or climber, or talker, or even, I suppose, a good husband or wife, but not that you would like to be a good person, which is a desire you can only mention to a clergyman.” Maybe this is why Macaulay chose to put the most lucid warning of the consequences of Laurie’s actions into the mouth of the otherwise completely unsympathetic Father Chantry-Pigg. The clergyman is fussy, bigoted, and sexist, but he proves heartbreakingly accurate in his prediction that, while Laurie’s relationship will inevitably end, it will be too late to reconcile her with her faith.
In general, though, even Laurie seems compelled to treat her own anguish obliquely, often to humorous effect. For example, after buying an ape from a sailor in Istanbul, she brings it back to the English countryside and begins to teach it to play chess and drive a car but also, tellingly, to develop “its conscience and sense of sin.” The travelling party’s camel is another animal drawn into Laurie’s moral struggle, making its first appearance in the novel’s oft-quoted first line: “'Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” I find it noteworthy that this camel is not, as one might expect, native to the Near East, but instead has been brought there by the eccentric English travellers. The camel makes an irritable and uncomfortable steed, and not long after arriving in Turkey, they become convinced that it is suffering from psychiatric problems. When the group splits up, Aunt Dot leaves a letter commending it to Laurie’s care: "It is very reserved and backward, and I think it has its own troubles and ambitions and seems to live in the past and I think it broods sometimes on Sex and is a bit frustrated, so treat it gently. Better not to let it run after other camels as it goes about, it is very excitable.” It takes only a little squinting to see this as a description of Laurie’s mental state at this moment, and it is tempting to think that, despite Aunt Dot’s seeming obliviousness, she is urging her niece in this note to be kinder to herself.
Laurie’s doomed affair is not the only tragedy treated by the novel with deceptive lightness. The same breezy tone is used to describe the cruelties of the long-ago Byzantine Empire as well as more contemporary catastrophes, as evoked, for example, by its occasional mention of the ruined Armenian churches in Turkey. The travellers note such traces of recent history but do not see them as the business of outsiders, an apolitical stance summed up by Aunt Dot when she says, “If one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.” While this statement has some validity, Macaulay stretches it to absurdity when Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg abandon Laurie en route and proceed to casually cross the border into the U.S.S.R. Though Laurie believes that they sincerely wish only to see the Caucasus mountains, consume koumiss, and fish for trout in a lake on the Soviet side, all the governments involved treat this decision as a deliberate act of espionage, an impression to which Aunt Dot frivolously contributes through her cavalier attitude. “I can never imagine what it is that countries want to know about each other,” she says. “I expect none of it is the least use really. But governments get these fancies, and are prepared to pay for them, so why not be in on it?”
Is the refusal to take anything seriously a sign of obnoxious entitlement, as it seems to be in Aunt Dot? Or is there a moving humility in Laurie’s approach, of not deriving too much importance from her own misfortune? What The Towers of Trebizond makes clear is that there is a cost in refusing to acknowledge that our deepest and most painful problems really do matter to us. As captivating as the flow of amusing entertainment is for readers, it turns out to be no more than a pleasant surface that ultimately cannot contain the tidal wave of grief.--Mary Thaler
