Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond (1956) is generally regarded as her masterpiece, and almost certainly it is the most commonly read of her novels today. It is also a sort of running tribute to Anglo-Catholicism, saturated with asides, often hilarious, about Anglo-Catholics and their peculiar habits and attitudes, and at the same time quietly appreciative of the magic and charisma of that tradition. I’ve often heard it described as an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ novel, but I’m not sure that that’s true. At least, it is hardly a vehicle for the devotional and sacramental seriousness of Anglo-Catholicism. It is not a novel which – unless something has escaped me – tries to illustrate the truth of Anglo-Catholic theology. Its narrator is a young woman, Laurie, engaged in an adulterous affair with a married man, and who seems to be drawn to Anglo-Catholicism despite her manner of life and despite her own hesitations about belief. But there is no clean resolution, no heavy moral at the end. This is not the novel of a latter-day Charlotte Yonge. It seems little more than a sort of picaresque, dilettante travelogue at first. But it sort of grows in depth, as the somewhat absurdist plot unfolds, becomes more complicated, and reveals the central moral dilemma of Laurie’s life.
The story centres round a journey Laurie makes with her eccentric Aunt Dot, a convinced Anglo-Catholic, and a Father Chantry-Pigg, into Turkey in the 1950s to save women by converting them from Islam to Anglicanism (for readers instantly alarmed, no one actually gets converted to Christianity in the novel, and one recent convert in facts reverts to Islam). They travel with a camel Dot has acquired, and then at first also with a Greek man, Xenophon (seriously), and a Turkish woman doctor, Halide, who has become a Christian. Halide is the person who returns to her original faith. The goal of the journey is Trebizond (Trabzon today), the fantastical Byzantine city on the Black Sea which briefly survived the fall of Constantinople before coming under Ottoman rule. But near the border with the Soviet Union, Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg unexpectedly disappear into Russia, leaving Laurie and Halide with Dot’s camel. Eventually Laurie returns home, torn between her spiritual attraction to Christianity and her rather more sensual attraction to Vere, the married man. Dot reappears a good while later, Laurie teaches an ape to drive and to become Anglo-Catholic (again, seriously…), and in a rather shocking denouement, the tension Laurie experiences between passion and faith is resolved by a terrible car accident in which Vere is killed.
Alternately whimsical, funny, and perceptive, it is quite hard at first to regard the narration as anything than a comic fantasy, a sort of folly made up of the utterly implausible. But in my view it would be quite unfair to dismiss the novel as anything other than a superficial delight. It seems to me to have some echoes of Laurence Sterne, perhaps even Cervantes. The humour appears to deflect more serious reflection, but actually as you read your way into the novel, and become more accustomed to the personality of Laurie, from whose perspective it is written, you begin to see that the diagonal associations, the darting back and forth, of the prose teases out more serious layers of experience and emotion. Laurie’s apparent drift – she sometimes seems to be utterly without a plan in life, pulled this way and that by her aunt, or by Vere – enables her to weigh up choices, to listen carefully to what others are saying, and even to see the limitations of her own position. Religion here is treated affectionately and mildly, and if on the one hand there is a certain inoculation against the severer demands of faith, on the other we’re left in no doubt that religious belief and practice is fully part of life.
There may be other dimensions, too. I’ll need to read the novel again some day to think more about this. Is Trebizond here intended to be a mystical destination, a sort of half-remembered, mythical past, evoking a goal which can never meet our expectations but makes the journey worthwhile for all that? Does it stand for a Christian past marooned in a world and time now distant from it? Does the ape – this is a really bizarre episode in the novel – somehow evoke the emptiness, the mechanical or unreflective nature of modern life? And what about Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg’s foray into the Soviet Union, which they seem to have undertaken in a spirit of flight from capitalism, but with a completely misplaced understanding of communism? I simply don’t know.
It is also quite hard to know what to make of the final tragic end of the novel, with Vere’s death in the car accident triggered by Laurie’s drug-fuelled (“I took a euphoria pill, which makes you feel as if you would get there in the end”) impulsiveness as driver. Is Macaulay killing off the sinful affair in punishment? It doesn’t impel Laurie towards church, despite her guilt, for Vere was not a believer, and she could not argue “against the gentle mockery of that mutilated figure whom I had loved and killed”. The novel ends on a sort of question mark, with a nod to the mystical, remembered experience of the towers of Trebizond.
Ad fontes 