The Towers of Trebizond
Encyclopedia
The Towers of Trebizond is a novel
by Rose Macaulay
(1881–1958). Published in 1956, it was the last of her novels, and the most successful. It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
for fiction in the year of its publication.
(or Constantinople
as Fr. Chantry-Pigg would have it) to Trebizond
. A Turkish feminist doctor attracted to Anglicanism acts as a foil to the main characters. On the way, they meet magicians, Turkish
policemen and juvenile British travel-writers, and observe the BBC and Billy Graham
on tour. Aunt Dot proposes to emancipate the women of Turkey by converting them to Anglicanism
and popularizing the bathing hat, while Laurie has more worldly preoccupations. Historical references (British Christianity since the Dissolution of the Monasteries
, nineteenth-century travellers to the Ottoman Empire
, the First World War, the Fourth Crusade
, St. Paul's Third Missionary Journey, Troy
) abound. The geographical canvas is enlarged with the two senior characters eloping to the Soviet Union
and the heroine meeting her lover and her semi-estranged mother in Jerusalem. The final chapters after a fatal accident on the return journey raise multiple issues such as the souls of animals.
At another level the book, against its Anglo-Catholic backdrop, deals with the attractions of mystical Christianity and the conflict between Christianity and adultery. This was a problem Macaulay had faced in her own life, having had an affair with the married novelist and former Roman Catholic priest Gerald O'Donovan (1871–1942) from 1920 until his death.
The famous opening sentence is,
The Turkish woman doctor says in the book of Aunt Dot, "She is a woman of dreams. Mad dreams, dreams of crazy, impossible things. And they aren't all of conversion to the Church, oh no. Nor all of the liberation of women, oh no. Her eyes are on far mountains, always some far peak where she will go. She looks so firm and practical, that nice face, so fair and plump and shrewd, but look in her eyes, you will sometimes catch a strange gleam."
Barbara Reynolds has suggested that the character of Aunt Dot is based on Rose Macaulay's friend Dorothy L. Sayers
, and that Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg has elements of Frs. Patrick McLaughlin
, Gilbert Shaw
and Gerard Irvine.
The book was described in The New York Times
: "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 camel itself is unnamed and described as “a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump) from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe” and as an “unconcerned Moslem”. As camels go, Aunt Dot’s is portrayed as being higher, or more special, than other camels: “…it was the one camel, among sheep and calves and donkeys and pigs, and stood looking tall and white and distinguished, showing race…”.
When Aunt Dot leaves the camel to Laurie, a new depth of meaning is brought to the famous first line of the novel: “Take my camel, dear…”. As Laurie rides the camel on her journey, it becomes a physical vehicle that takes her through Biblical lands that, to her, seem alive with ancient history and mythology: “…and that I and the camel were part of the gorgeous pageant of the East” (189). However, Laurie’s journey is more than just a trek through the desert on an Arabian racing camel. Her true journey, with the help of the camel, is a spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and biblical seat of religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
On her pilgrimage, she is free of the influences of Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg. Alone with the camel, she is able to explore her own feelings and thoughts about religion, right and wrong, Truth and untruth: “Believe it? What does believe mean? You don’t know, I don’t know. So I believe what I want. Anyhow, it’s in the blood; I probably can’t help it”.
The camel in The Towers of Trebizond facilitates Laurie’s search for a deeper meaning of the divine truth of religion than what Christianity offers.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Rose Macaulay
Rose Macaulay
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE was an English writer. She published thirty-five books, mostly novels but also biographies and travel writing....
(1881–1958). Published in 1956, it was the last of her novels, and the most successful. It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for fiction in the year of its publication.
Plot
The book is largely autobiographical. It follows the adventures of a group of people - the narrator Laurie, the eccentric Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett (otherwise Aunt Dot), her High Anglican clergyman friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg (who keeps his collection of sacred relics in his pockets), travelling from IstanbulIstanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
(or Constantinople
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...
as Fr. Chantry-Pigg would have it) to Trebizond
Trabzon
Trabzon is a city on the Black Sea coast of north-eastern Turkey and the capital of Trabzon Province. Trabzon, located on the historical Silk Road, became a melting pot of religions, languages and culture for centuries and a trade gateway to Iran in the southeast and the Caucasus to the northeast...
. A Turkish feminist doctor attracted to Anglicanism acts as a foil to the main characters. On the way, they meet magicians, Turkish
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
policemen and juvenile British travel-writers, and observe the BBC and Billy Graham
Billy Graham
William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian evangelist. As of April 25, 2010, when he met with Barack Obama, Graham has spent personal time with twelve United States Presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman, and is number seven on Gallup's list of admired people for...
on tour. Aunt Dot proposes to emancipate the women of Turkey by converting them to Anglicanism
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
and popularizing the bathing hat, while Laurie has more worldly preoccupations. Historical references (British Christianity since the Dissolution of the Monasteries
Dissolution of the Monasteries
The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their...
, nineteenth-century travellers to the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
, the First World War, the Fourth Crusade
Fourth Crusade
The Fourth Crusade was originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt. Instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders of Western Europe invaded and conquered the Christian city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire...
, St. Paul's Third Missionary Journey, Troy
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
) abound. The geographical canvas is enlarged with the two senior characters eloping to the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the heroine meeting her lover and her semi-estranged mother in Jerusalem. The final chapters after a fatal accident on the return journey raise multiple issues such as the souls of animals.
At another level the book, against its Anglo-Catholic backdrop, deals with the attractions of mystical Christianity and the conflict between Christianity and adultery. This was a problem Macaulay had faced in her own life, having had an affair with the married novelist and former Roman Catholic priest Gerald O'Donovan (1871–1942) from 1920 until his death.
The famous opening sentence is,
The Turkish woman doctor says in the book of Aunt Dot, "She is a woman of dreams. Mad dreams, dreams of crazy, impossible things. And they aren't all of conversion to the Church, oh no. Nor all of the liberation of women, oh no. Her eyes are on far mountains, always some far peak where she will go. She looks so firm and practical, that nice face, so fair and plump and shrewd, but look in her eyes, you will sometimes catch a strange gleam."
Barbara Reynolds has suggested that the character of Aunt Dot is based on Rose Macaulay's friend Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages...
, and that Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg has elements of Frs. Patrick McLaughlin
Patrick McLaughlin (churchman)
Patrick McLaughlin was an Anglican priest and Christian thinker who resigned the priesthood of the Church of England in 1962 and became a Roman Catholic. While he was a priest, he was known as Father Patrick McLaughlin...
, Gilbert Shaw
Gilbert Shaw
Gilbert Shuldham Shaw was an Anglo-Irish Church of England priest, from 1940 vicar of St Anne's Soho. His maternal grandfather was Sir Philip Crampton Smyly, honorary physician to Queen Victoria, and he was baptised by his mother's uncle, William Conyngham Plunket, archbishop of Dublin...
and Gerard Irvine.
The book was described in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
: "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."
Camels
The importance of the camel in Rose Mcaulay’s novel, The Towers of Trebizond is difficult to define. One reading may be that it serves as both a physical and metaphorical vehicle that helps Laurie explore her spirituality while she discovers the Turkish countryside and journeys to Jerusalem.The camel itself is unnamed and described as “a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump) from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe” and as an “unconcerned Moslem”. As camels go, Aunt Dot’s is portrayed as being higher, or more special, than other camels: “…it was the one camel, among sheep and calves and donkeys and pigs, and stood looking tall and white and distinguished, showing race…”.
When Aunt Dot leaves the camel to Laurie, a new depth of meaning is brought to the famous first line of the novel: “Take my camel, dear…”. As Laurie rides the camel on her journey, it becomes a physical vehicle that takes her through Biblical lands that, to her, seem alive with ancient history and mythology: “…and that I and the camel were part of the gorgeous pageant of the East” (189). However, Laurie’s journey is more than just a trek through the desert on an Arabian racing camel. Her true journey, with the help of the camel, is a spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and biblical seat of religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
On her pilgrimage, she is free of the influences of Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg. Alone with the camel, she is able to explore her own feelings and thoughts about religion, right and wrong, Truth and untruth: “Believe it? What does believe mean? You don’t know, I don’t know. So I believe what I want. Anyhow, it’s in the blood; I probably can’t help it”.
The camel in The Towers of Trebizond facilitates Laurie’s search for a deeper meaning of the divine truth of religion than what Christianity offers.
Editions
- The first UK edition was published by Collins of LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1956. - The first US edition (under the same title) was published by Farrar, Straus, of New YorkNew YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, in 1957, with a new edition by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1980. - A de luxe edition from the Folio SocietyFolio SocietyThe Folio Society is a book club based in London that produces new editions of classic books. Their books are notable for their high quality bindings and original illustrations...
, of London, with an introduction by Joanna TrollopeJoanna TrollopeJoanna Trollope OBE , is an English novelist.-Life:Joanna Trollope was educated at Reigate County School for Girls followed by St Hugh's College, Oxford. From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign Office...
, appeared in 2005 and is still in print. - A UK paperback version is also still in print, published by Flamingo.
- An edition was published by the New York Review of Books in 2003 with an introduction by Jan MorrisJan MorrisJan Morris CBE is a Welsh nationalist, historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City.With an English mother and Welsh father,...