I don’t want to put anyone off, but I think that readers will miss some of the humour in The Towers of Trebizond if they don’t have enough background knowledge. Let me try to explain, with the help of Wikipedia (lightly edited as usual to remove unnecessary links).
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (1 August 1881 – 30 October 1958) was an English writer, most noted for her award-winning novel The Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography, reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs.
Well, yes it is, but that description (apart from the camel) makes it sound earnest and boring. The truth is that most of the time Macaulay is poking fun at religion in general and at hers in particular. It is often laugh-out-loud funny, but as I can see from reviews at Goodreads not everyone gets the joke.
Some will be put off by the beginning. It starts with her faux-naïve narrator’s drollery about how her family navigated centuries of the fraught history of the church in England — and that relies on having some knowledge of British kings and queens and their hangers on and how they bumped each other off to suit the religious beliefs prevailing in their era; and on knowing something about church politics. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy would help with some but not all of this.
I knew about enough about English church politics because I have read Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855-1867)…
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- The Warden (1855)
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- Barchester Towers (1857)
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- Doctor Thorne (1858)
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- Framley Parsonage (1860)
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- The Small House at Allington (1862)
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- The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
… and I have also read Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series (1987-1994) which is a family saga that traces the history of the Church of England… but it’s also (more interestingly) about the same kind of ambitious shenanigans and scandals and human greed and theological argy-bargy that you find in Trollope. Both of these series are excellent reading, but… well, not a lot of people read the classics these days and my guess is that the appeal of the once best-selling Howatch series has faded. It’s described by one reader at Goodreads as “like romance novels for Anglicans” where “the narrative place of sex in a romance novel is taken by spiritual direction”). Oh dear.
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- Glittering Images (1987)
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- Glamorous Powers (1988)
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- Ultimate Prizes (1989)
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- Scandalous Risks (1990)
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- Mystical Paths (1992)
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- Absolute Truths (1994)
1938 Cadmus Edition
1963 Heinemann Educational edition
As for British history, my broad grasp of that was formed by reading H.E. Marshall’s Kings and Things (1937) which is a light-hearted romp through British history written for children, (see my review at Goodreads.) I also did British History at school (but though the philanthropists and reformers were interesting, it was mostly about roads and steam engines and rather boring, so I switched to Music Appreciation in Term 2). In English Lit we did Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons (1954), which is about the travails of St. Thomas More v. Henry VIII — who, thanks to the film industry, is well-known in popular culture for bumping off his wives, but I suspect less well-known for his persecution of religious malcontents.
These porcelain thimbles can be used for a parlour game requiring guests to put Henry’s wives in the correct order. My Australian friends are generally not very good at it. Nor am I if I’ve had a wine or two.
Readers of The Towers of Trebizond also need to know that Ataturk was the early C20th founding president of Turkey and a secular moderniser. (But, though Wikipedia scampers over it, probably because of zealous Turkish editing, he was also implicated in the genocide of the remnant Armenian population).
You don’t really need to know where Trebizond is, but thanks to Carol, She’s So Novel at Goodreads, (who rated the book with 5-stars!) here’s an old map of the region during the Byzantine Empire.
Ok, enough. You can see that I was reasonably well-armed for The Towers of Trebizond but I am not surprised that not everyone finds it such great reading. Some books have a time and a place and a readership that fades with time, and I think this, sadly, is one of them. I will be only too pleased to be wrong about this, but I will only recant if objectors are from generations younger than mine.
The three main characters are the narrator Laurie; her eccentric Aunt Dot (more formally known as Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett); and a High Anglican clergyman called Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Laurie just wants to travel and is delighted by the proposal to visit Turkey, but the other two are on a mission. Literally. They want to convert The Turks to their (differing) versions of Christianity. On the trip, they meet up with travel writers David and Charles, and also a feminist doctor called Halide who (like Aunt Dot) is interested in the emancipation of rural Turkish women still under the veil despite Ataturk. Halide converted to Christianity while at university in Britain but has now fallen in love with a Muslim man. And she feels that she could not be a Moslem wife and bring up children to all that.
The jocular tone shifts then, to a sense of personal anguish…
I thought about how sad it was, all this progress and patriotism and marching on and conquering the realms of culture, yet love rising up to spoil all and hold one back, and what was the Christian Church and what was Islam against this that submerged the human race and always had? It had submerged Anthony and Cleopatra, and Abelard and Heloise, and Lancelot and Guinevere, and Paolo and Francesca, and Romeo and Juliet, and Charles Parnell and Faust, and Oscar Wilde and me, and Halide and her Moslem man, and countless millions more. It kept me outside the Church, and might drive Halide out of it, it was the great force, and drove like a hurricane, shattering everything in its way, no one had a chance against it, the only thing was to go with it, because it always won. (p.102)
The church from which Laura is estranged says that her long-standing affair with Vere, is a sin. Macaulay herself, as you might remember from my review of Lara Feigel’s The Love-charm of Bombs, Restless Lives in the Second World War (2013), had a long-term affair which ended in the death of her lover from cancer in 1942. Macaulay knew to her great cost, the grief and pain of being The Other Woman.
Laura does not want to be saved from her sins, not for the time being, it would make things too difficult and too sad.
I was getting into a stage when I was not quite sure what sin was, I was in a kind of fog, drifting about without clues, and this is liable to happen when you go on and on doing something, it makes a confused sort of twilight in which everything is blurred, and the next thing you know you might be stealing or anything, because right and wrong have become things you do not look at, you are afraid to, and it seems better to live in a blur. (p.150)
I have often thought that it is a most strange thing that this important part of human life, the struggle that almost everyone has about good and evil, cannot now be talked of without embarrassment, unless of course one is in church. (p.151).
I think it’s a distortion of the ethics that Macaulay is challenging in this book, to characterise it as ‘a spiritual autobiography’.
Macaulay also satirises travel writing and the preoccupations of the Cold War. Her narrator is peeved that the enthusiasm for travel and writing travel books makes it difficult to find anywhere that hasn’t already been written about, and I suspect that Charles (who plagiarises David’s writing after David comes to a sticky end) was probably based on someone she knew. (Macaulay was writing near the end of her long life, so she may have felt that, in fiction, she could deal with it and her part in making it known. Why not? It was blatant plagiarism.)
There are also the hilarious escapades of Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg, who disappear over the (tense) border to the USSR because Chantry-Pigg wants to convert some ‘fanatics’ and Aunt Dot yearns to see the (Soviet) Armenian scenery. As an aside, Macaulay, dripping with sarcasm, mentions some travel writers who the Turks thought had a morbid interest in Armenia and shown too much sympathy for the recently massacred Armenians. It is beyond bizarre that in our own time Turkey has made it a crime to acknowledge the Armenian genocide; I will lose all of my wavering respect for the EU if ever they admit Turkey while this genocide remains unacknowledged. Macaulay has no hesitation in bringing it to her readers’ attention.
The narrator slyly notes the consul’s warning about the sensitivities of the imams towards Aunt Dot’s crass plans for proselytising (and her wilful disregard of local mores by bathing in the sea), but she writes that while Aunt Dot liked the consul and his wife who had been most kind and civil,…
… she did not want to make trouble for them, [but] actually that is what consuls expect and are there for. (p.81)
Throughout their travels in Turkey their group has been thought to be a group of spies and in the wake of Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg’s disappearance, the newspapers go into overdrive. There is speculation that they have eloped, but also that they are in league with the real life British defectors Burgess and Maclean.
I dined that night with Halide. We talked about aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg, who were now, it seemed, news in three continents, on account of being spies. The continents were Europe, America and Asia-Minor.
‘They have been seen,’ said Halide. ‘Everywhere in Russia they have been seen. In the Caucasus, in Tiflis, in Siberia, in Stalingrad, in Moscow, in the Crimea. They have been seen in cafés with your Burgess and Maclean.’
‘What were they doing?’ I asked, hoping that they had been having a good time.
‘How should I know?’ said Halide, who was not hoping this at all. ‘Drinking vodka, playing tric-trac, talking, telling secrets, spying. Then too, Father Pigg has been seen in churches, hob-nobbing with priests.’ (p.209)
In their absence, Laurie goes back to England, taking with her the camel and an ape, which she teaches to play chess, to drive and to behave in church. I could quote the hilarious account of this ‘civilisation’ of the ape, but I have written far too much already.
Ali at HeavenAli read and reviewed a beautiful first edition for the 1956 Club, and Simon at Stuck in a Book reviewed the NYRB reissue so the book is still easy to source.
Author: Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)
Title: The Towers of Trebizond
Publisher: Flamingo Modern Classics, 1995, first published 1956
Cover illustraiton by Adam Dicks
ISBN: 9780006544210, pbk., 277 pages
Source: OpShopFind $7.00
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
Well done, Lisa! Another thoughtful review of a book that clearly deserves to be better known.
I assume the edition you read had no Introduction by a modern commentator (such as yourself), and no explanator Notes (by a knowledgeable editor).
In my experience of reading authors from the Twentieth century, who were well understood by their readers of the time, modern readers may lack the historical and cultural background knowledge that was, at the time, “current affairs” and daily news, or familiar from the traditional school curriculum.
New editions of these ageing books may revive their appeal by adding — in ample detail — the material the authors assumed all readers of the time would simply know. D.H. Lawrence, for example, or Evelyn Waugh, increasingly need such “extra” supporting material to be properly appreciated by modern readers.
I often read a book using a sheet of paper on which I make notes, as I go, recording the extra details that the author assumes would be familiar but that I know a modern reader (I am a fossil of 74, so I hardly count as a “modern reader”) is unlikely to appreciate.
I have even published annotated editions of old books that I like.
Do you think “The Towers of Trebizond” now need the kind of annotation that Trollope and Dickens, and Hardy and Wells need?
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By: John Gough on June 26, 2023
at 10:04 am
Thanks, John:)
I have just checked Simon’s review of the NYRB reissue and it does have an introduction by Jan Morris though he doesn’t make mention of that…
In general, I find annotations a distraction to the reading, but I like the way Oxford World Classics provide a good intro at the beginning and notes at the end. That way, during the reading, I can choose whether to follow them up or not.
What’s this book you’ve published?!
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 10:19 am
I have published annotated eBooks by C.J. Dennis: his four “larrikin” novels, starting with “The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke”.
I am finalising an annotated edition of Dennis’s other verse-novel, “The Glugs of Gosh”.
Also, I have ePublished annotated editions of (USA author) Alice Duer Miller’s verse-novel “The White Cliffs”, and a couple of her earlier novels loosely comparable to P.G. Wodehouse.
These, and other eBooks, are at Amazon US.
Explanatory articles about these are at Academia.edu
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By: John Gough on June 26, 2023
at 10:39 am
*smacks forehead* Of course, I remember talking about that before…
CJ Dennis definitely needs annotations, that’s for sure. It’s often the case with books that use contemporary slang which fades with time, and local dialects and expressions too, which can lose their ubiquity when more dominant languages take over.
But with this book, it’s more a case of assumptions about society, things that “everyone” would know about England and its history and institutions, when the UK was more monocultural than it is now.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 11:23 am
With C.J. Dennis’s “Bloke” tetralogy, there is much more than the obsolete and Aussie-mainly slang to explain. The world was a different place, starting with inner Melbourne. And, as soon as we move to “The Moods of Ginger Mick” all the contemporary details of the Australian Army in Egypt and at Gallipoli during the Great War needs clarification. Even the idea of a man lifting his ubiquitous hat when greeting a lady deserves a brief note, or else we have no idea why the Bloke dips his lid.
As for “The Glugs of Gosh”, which is slang-free, the story needs frequent explanation to understand the free-wheeling satire of Free Trade versus Protectionism, and Australia’s sense of threat from foreign powers before and during the Great War, not to mention the implicit literary allusions.
Of course, Lisa, you are right that a solid Twentieth century novel might need notes to explain details of that era which are now vague or forgotten.
This is why my four large articles about Elizabeth Goudge’s novels serve as an accumulation of Notes on such things as the many poems and authors and books Goudge’s narrative includes, plus her references to passages of the Bible, plus the historical context of her stories, plus her exploration of relationships between men and women before the Pill and the liberalisation of earlier morals, …
Arguably, England had a dominant culture, but was not an actual monoculture even before our modern waves of migration and multiculturalism. Differences in class, and in social origins (English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, Romani), and differences in religion (Church of England, Roman Catholic, and non-establishment Protestantism), and between generations, were far more distinct and different than is often realised.
Rose Macauley needs all the explanation she can be given, if her novels are not to be set aside as out-of-date. I am sure her issues are as vital as ever, once they are understood as well as you do, drawing on your well-informed reading.
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By: John Gough on June 26, 2023
at 4:02 pm
You’re right of course, but it was the word usage that flummoxed me.
And I always have difficulty with anything that uses biblical allusions, apart from the very common ones.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 9:03 pm
Allusions, Lisa, Biblical or otherwise, plus book titles, and famous names, are easy to search for nowadays, on the internet.
I used to rely on my 1980s Penguin Book of Quotations, but googling is easier, and provides more than just the original source, or meaning.
But good notes or annotations eliminate needing to read beside a computer.
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By: John Gough on June 26, 2023
at 9:21 pm
Yes, plus, sometimes you don’t know what it is you need to know, and annotations can put you in the right direction.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 10:06 pm
Reblogged this on penwithlit and commented:
I loved reading “The World My Wilderness”- about the Maquis and Rosebay Willowherb!
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By: penwithlit on June 26, 2023
at 7:51 pm
I have that one too, so that’s good to hear.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 8:57 pm
I have this in the TBR and I’m hoping to get to it soon, so this is super helpful, thank you Lisa!
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By: madamebibilophile on June 26, 2023
at 8:08 pm
I’m keen to hear what you think of it!
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 9:03 pm
Such an interesting post, Lisa, and so informative! I’ve read a fair bit of Macaulay, and do have this on the TBR, so what you’ve said will be most helpful. I must admit that I do feel that younger generations of readers don’t have the wider knowledge of the world and what’s gone before that we older types do – but then I’m probably just a curmudgeonly old bat!!
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on June 26, 2023
at 10:27 pm
Well, of course the shoe is on the other foot when it comes to background knowledge of popular culture today! I’ve come across a few books where I just haven’t had a clue what they were on about…
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By: Lisa Hill on June 26, 2023
at 10:58 pm
LOL, likewise…. 🤣🤣
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on June 27, 2023
at 1:17 am
This one’s been on my TBR ever since a book group picked it as one of their reads (I’m pretty sure it’s something like 8 years now). I only found the book much later. I know it didn’t sit well with everyone who read it and I can somewhat see from your review why this might be. I have read the Barchesters so I have at least some ammunition before jumping in!
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By: mallikabooks15 on June 29, 2023
at 10:30 pm
I love the Barchesters, and I still watch the BBC versions which I have on DVD.
I can see why it was chosen for your group, because it would be fun to discuss with people who loved it, but it could be awkward for those who don’t ‘get it’ because it could turn into one long explain-a-thon.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 3, 2023
at 9:31 am
Great blog, looking at the political and cultural history of nations through Literature. This is fascinating! I recently read about Goethe’s comparative study of World literature as he investigated the historical connections between different literatures of surrounding countries, to find out when, at what points, and why, they influence each other (Goethe and World Literature, 1949). His world was much smaller! I always appreciate your global insights! Robyn
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By: Robyn on June 30, 2023
at 1:54 am
Thanks, Robyn, I’ve learned a lot from your blog.
Not quite in the same realm as Goethe, I’ve got some early- to mid-C20th surveys of Australian literature, and yes, it’s striking how much smaller the world seemed then.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 3, 2023
at 9:34 am
I read a review the other day which said “don’t read if you’re not English.” The reader felt that they had ‘missed’ a lot of references.
Did not know that Howatch wrote the series you mention. Sounds like my cuppa. I read a few of hers years yonks ago–The Rich are Different and a few others.
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By: Guy Savage on July 3, 2023
at 6:01 am
Ah, well there I differ from your reviewer. Not being English is not at all the same as not having background knowledge, because one can certainly do something about the latter… as I do when I don’t have background knowledge about other countries or cultures etc.
I remember the Howatch series very well because it was a rare instance of a work colleague recommending a book I liked. You know how it is, when people know you’re a reader, they inevitably recommend you read the one book they’ve read that year. One has to become an accomplished liar so as not to hurt feelings. (It’s never a good idea to do that in the work place.)
But when Kath pressed Book 1 of the Starbridge series into my hands, I’d struck gold!
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By: Lisa Hill on July 3, 2023
at 9:40 am
I picked up the first one in the series so thanks for the rec. And yes, I know how it is.
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By: Guy Savage on July 4, 2023
at 8:26 am