Swanvale Halt Book Club: The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay (1956)

I read Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure of Ruins many years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to her final and most celebrated novel. It's a book you couldn't write now, if only because nobody would understand all the stuff about Anglicanism, as the narrator Laurie makes her way across Turkey with her Anglo-Catholic Aunt Dot and priest friend Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg who aim to establish an Anglican school. Just occasionally Laurie's guileless and lengthy sentences of linked clauses come close to wearing out their welcome, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of her taking home an ape she bought from a Greek sailor and teaches to drive (only round the estate, obviously), but I looked forward to reading it each night and finding out what becomes of the characters. 

The Towers of Trebizond is usually described as comic, understandably so when the famous first line is '"Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass'. She and Fr Pigg wander over the border into the Soviet Union to look at a lake and disappear, only to be 'escorted' to an interrogation when they return to Britain. Laurie takes back her aunt's bad-tempered camel (along with the ape), unsure what she will do with it. Yet, not only does the book contain perhaps the best and most humane account of how religion goes wrong, and right, in a couple of pages that I've ever read, serious moments emerge through the silliness and become ever more prominent as time goes on. We learn in passing that Laurie is in an adulterous relationship which complicates how she relates to the Church she can't help being attracted to; we meet David and Charles (surely a gay couple) who fall out while writing books about Turkey, and, after Charles gets eaten by sharks, David takes to passing his work off as his own. Everyone is engaged in some sort of deception or self-deception, Dot and Fr Pigg's plans as illusory as David's reputation or Laurie's scheme of primate education. Trebizond itself, the famed capital of a tiny, dream-like Byzantine offshoot empire, exists only in the imagination, now being represented by quotidian Turkish Trabzon. 

Finally an incident so terrible, violent and unexpected turns the novel into a tragedy and show that a work can be both frivolous and profound. Any book whose narrator says at the end 'I now live in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love', can only be overwhelmingly sad. Dreams, the dreams of Trebizond and its towers, are what power us poor human beings, and yet sometimes - often - dreams can't be reconciled.