"'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.
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Book Description
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
"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.
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 65 people found the following review helpful
By Hoodlum
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
36 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty insipid
Although book was highly reviewed as a "rediscovery," I found the descriptive material too weak and not engaging enough to be a good travel account. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Judith Ewell
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fun.
I'm not a professional reviewer, just a lover of books. This was fun. Very typically British in its sense of humor. Read more
Published 4 months ago by L. Stafford
3.0 out of 5 stars
the cover ratings were over done
It was amusing in some parts w/ clever word play, but it deteriorated toward the end. Archaic language made it somewhat difficult to read.
Published 4 months ago by S. Hayes
3.0 out of 5 stars
Travels with my Aunt
I was glad to come to the end of this novel, which seemed to me to have a mish-mash of ideas behind it. Read more
Published 7 months ago by sally tarbox
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pleasantly old-fashioned
A fine example of a very tried and true tradition: English ladies of independent means travel to faraway lands in the years before the demise of the Empire and have adventures, in... Read more
Published 10 months ago by las cosas
1.0 out of 5 stars
problem
I would love to write a review if the items had ever arrived which they haven't.
I found the book in Paris. Captured by its famous opening sentence, I bought it. Read more
I found the book in Paris. Captured by its famous opening sentence, I bought it. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Mary M. Acevedo
3.0 out of 5 stars
The novel as travelogue
You know how it is with some trips. You start out enchanted, you marvel at each wonder, you move on to the next. Every day sparkles. Read more
Published on May 25, 2011 by Bruce Watson
5.0 out of 5 stars
A study in love and Anglicanism
On the surface, this is a story of a visit to both dark and darling Eastern countries with many whimisical happenings. Read more
Published on April 29, 2011 by Abby Visore
4.0 out of 5 stars
Have camel, will travel
Not having read or heard about THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND before, I was confused when I began, as to whether this was a novel or a travel book. Read more
Published on February 7, 2011 by Robert S. Newman
5.0 out of 5 stars
British eccentricity and wit pay off in this charming and funny travel...
Set in the 1950s, THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND by Rose Macaulay assembles a "nosebleed" high Anglican churchman, a liberated female Turkish physician, dotty old Aunt Dot the intrepid... Read more
Published on October 19, 2010 by Allen Smalling
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