The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Rose MacAulay (Author), Jan Morris (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: November 30, 2003

"'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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond is an utter delight, the most brilliantly witty and captivatingly charm-ing book I have read since I can’t remember when… . Fantasy, farce, high comedy, lively travel material, delicious japes at many aspects of the frenzied modern world, and a succession of illuminating thoughts about love, sex, life, organized churches and religion are all tossed together with enchanting results." —The New York Times

"Novelist, poet, journalist, wit, and world-class diner out, Rose Macaulay was one of the most popular writers and personalities in England from the 1920s until her death, in 1958. The ebullient Macaulay was friends, it seemed with everyone. Rupert Brooke, Gilbert Murray, Harold Nicolson, John Betjeman, and Virginia Woolf were only a few of those who prized an intelligence that, though 'acid,' in Nicolson’s words, was 'citrous merely and never poisoned.'” —Brooke Allen, The Atlantic Monthly

About the Author

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was born in Rugby, England, into a family of eminent scholars and Anglican clerics. The second of seven children, a tomboy who hoped one day to join the Navy, she spent much of her childhood in Varezze, a small Italian seaside town, where she enjoyed considerable independence for an English child of her era. In 1894, her family returned to Britain, and after studying modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, she began a career as a writer and quickly succeeded in supporting herself as a novelist, journalist, and critic. During World War I, she worked as a nurse and as a civil servant in the War Office before assuming a position in the British Propaganda Department. There she met Gerald O’Donovan, a sometime Irish Catholic priest, novelist, and married man, with whom she had a romantic relationship which was to last until his death in 1942. Rose Macaulay was the author of thirty-five books—twenty-three of them novels—and is best remembered for Potterism, a satire of yellow journalism; a biography of Milton; her haunting post-World War II novel, The World My Wilderness; two travel books, They Went to Portugal and Fabled Shore; and her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond. A mentor to Elizabeth Bowen and a friend to such luminaries as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rupert Brooke, E.M. Forster, and Rosamond Lehmann, Macaulay was a well-known figure in London’s literary world and a fabled wit. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire shortly before her death in 1958.

Jan Morris was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, six volumes of collected travel essays, two memoirs, two capricious biographies, and a couple of novels—but she defines her entire oeuvre as “disguised autobiography.” She is an honorary D.Litt. of the University of Wales and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. 

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (November 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159017058X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590170588
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #118,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorites!, March 18, 2004

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Hoodlum (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magical, funny, learned, expansive, unique, December 15, 2003

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Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Return of an old favorite, July 7, 2004

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Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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.