The Towers of Trebizond

I'll be the first to admit that Dame Rose Macaulay's classic The Towers of Trebizond (#303) isn't everybody's cup of tea, but it certainly is mine.  Originally published in 1956 and re-issued last year, I heard about this book from Nancy Pearl on one of her NPR segments last summer, when she said it was one of her perennial favorites.  Who could not love a book whose first sentence is ""Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."?

Laurie, the youngish narrator of the tale, is asked by the same aunt Dot to accompany her on a trip to Trebizond on an Anglican Church Mission to probe the possibility of evangelizing the population of rural Turkey, and writing a book about the role of women (downtrodden!) around the Euxine Sea at the same time.  Laurie can assist with arrangements and provide watercolor illustrations for Dot's book.  Since they are going out under the auspices of the Anglican Church, a priest will be part of their party.  This representative of the ultra high Anglo-Catholic St. Gregory Church in London rejoices in the name of the Rev. the Hon. Hugh Chantry-Pigg, a name sure to raise eyebrows in a Moslem country.  Oh, and of course, the camel will be going.  All does not go as planned, and Laurie is left holding the camel on the shores of the Black Sea...

But the real pleasure in reading The Towers of Trebizond is not solely in the absurdity of the plot, but in all the meandering paths Laurie's mind takes us on from the droll skewering of theological minutiae, to pondering on faith itself and the nature of goodness and morality, to the problems of traveling abroad when everyone else one knows is also doing Turkey and writing books about it.  It is definitely not what one would term "politically correct" today!

I did so enjoy the section of the book that described the war between the High Church Anglicans, Low Church Anglicans and Roman Catholics fighting it out in London's St. Gregory's Church, and the connection the author makes between success as an Anglican and one's fishing skills.  I was delighted to come across a reference to The Monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the home of the Cowley Fathers in America.  It also happened to be the former home of  Tom Shaw, the current Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, before he was elected.  How do I know this?  I have been present at a few "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" discussions in real life. 

There is also an amusing section that describes Laurie's acquisition of an ape that she brings home to England and trains to play chess and croquet, and to drive a car and ride a bicycle which satirizes some of the primate experiments then going on.

The cover blurb says that The Towers of Trebizond is erudite, which it is, but not in a yawn-inducing way.  I don't read Greek, so I did miss some of the finer points of obscure theological arguments. When I mentioned this to a friend who does read Greek, he laughed and told me "If you don't understand Greek, you have no business reading this book!"  Father Chantry-Pigg would definitely feel this way, but you shouldn't.

I had also assumed that Trebizond was a fictitious location.  I was surprised to find that it was a real place, and at one time, the center of its own Empire on the southern coast of the Black Sea, or Euxine Sea as it was known to the Greeks and Romans.  But I don't feel too badly about that since I asked that same friend if he had ever heard of it, and he had not.  He's a classics professor and dean of his college, so I figured I was in good company in my ignorance.  Apparently you had to have been an upper class Brit to long to travel there.

The upshot is that if you like to mix philosophy, travel, theology, church politics, and the role of women in the Middle East with theater of the absurd that doesn't seem so crazy as you're reading it, The Towers of Trezibond may be a hidden treasure waiting for you to discover it.  I know exactly whom I'm passing this book to next for summer escapism reading!