The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: " Considered Macaulay's masterpiece"
Review: Rose Macaulay, the author of 35 books, The Towers of Trebizond is considered her masterpiece. In it, she recounts an hilarious overland journey in the 1950s across Turkey to the legendary town of Trebizond. On the way she meet potion-selling sorcerers, dirty cops and a busload of Southern Baptists.


Rating:
Summary: Eccentric And Touching
Review: The Towers of Trebizond might mislead a reader who picks it up into thinking it to be a standard travel account of a journey to Turkey and the Middle East in the 1950s. However, the famous first line "Take my camel, dear . . ." will soon warn that there is much much more to this hilarious, odd little novel.

Rose Macaulay uses as narrator the ambiguously named Laurie. Most people assume Laurie is a woman, and there is some internal evidence to substantiate this, but as other reviewers have pointed out, Laurie could just as well be a man, and in some ways, the story makes more sense if he is.

Regardless of Laurie's gender, the story revolves principally around her/his Aunt Dot, one of the great British eccentrics, and her escapades on a journey through Turkey and into the Soviet Union. Her adventures, and those of Laurie, the camel, a monkey, and various other assorted characters, are hilarious. At the same time, there is a sad note of wistfulness tand a sense of loss and deprivation that are not quite so easy to sort out.

Read The Towers of Trebizond and laugh, but you'll be pondering it in more solemn moments for a long time to come.



Rating:
Summary: Delightful eccentrics travelling in Turkey
Review: Three people set off to Turkey with different motives, the narrator with the intention of writing a travel book, her Great-Aunt Dot, a feminist who wants to investigate the position of women in Turkey, and Father Chantry-Pigg, an Angilcan (Episcopalian) missionary. Their experiences in Turkey are narrated with Rose macualay's usual wit. Rivalry between writers is amusingly treated as the narrator meets more people who are writing their own Turkey books, all suspicious of each other. Wishing to visit the site of Troy, she finds that there are an abundance of sites laying claim to that honour. A Turkish feminist who is convinced that the way forward for Turkish women is to wear hats like English ladies. This delightful book has a rather abruptly sad ending, but is a joy to read all the same.

Rating:
Summary: Inimitable brilliance
Review: With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of reading pleasure, Macaulay's narrator takes us along on her adventures in northern Turkey with her eccentric, camel-riding Anglican aunt and a grumpy missionary. Her aunt's mission is to study the condition of women in Turkey; the priest's, to convert Muslims; and the narrator's, to draw pictures for her aunt's "Turkey book" and enjoy some travel. This simple premise yields a rich harvest of comic character studies and a gradually unfolding, more serious subtext in which Laurie, the narrator, struggles with her agnosticism and the adultery she has been carrying on for ten years. Macaulay has a wonderfully deadpan writing style marked by compound sentences strung together with "and" and often ending in a short, droll phrase. She is so amusing that you hardly notice how emotionally reserved her narrator is, as she recounts her Anatolian adventures with and without her aunt and the priest - exploring Trebizond, heading into the mountains in search of good fishing, alone on the camel with a high fever and money running out, cadging favors from a fellow Brit whose personal duplicity she has discovered and could expose, meeting her mother and her mother's wealthy "protector" by chance in Syria, and traveling to Jerusalem. Until it's back in print, find it at the library or through used book sellers.