Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Great books are never what you think they are going to be. In fact, I don't know why I approach previously unread works with any preconceived notions whatsoever, because I always end up tossing these notions over the side very early on, usually by the end of the first several paragraphs. Which is what happened with The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. From what I'd heard about this book, I was expecting P.G. Wodehouse meets Evelyn Waugh. Of course, what I got was Rose Macaulay. And her comic/tragic novel set primarily in 1950s England and Turkey.

The first half of the novel is a verbose and droll send-up of the Church of England, personified by the narrator's Anglican missionary aunt Dot ffoulkes-Corbett and her traveling companion Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, both intent on converting Turks and visiting sites of Christian antiquity. While deeply embroiled in this main theme, Macaulay also manages to roast the genre of travel writing very nicely, by introducing various other writers both real and fictional, many of whom are busily roaming about while scribbling their "Turkey books."

The second half of the novel (stick with it, through the sometimes dense theological patter of the first half) does an about face and sends our narrator off by camel across the Levant and finally back to England, all the while embroiled in an unsuitable love affair which is almost completely unmentioned in the first half of the book. I won't elaborate on the plot except to say that the denouement is terribly moving, particularly the last two pages. Which took me completely by surprise, considering the largely comic and wittily offhand nature of the prose style. Jan Morris wrote the introduction to the NYRB softcover reprint I have my paws on, and she considers this novel to be Macaulay's finest, as well as her lightly-disguised autobiography, in many key ways. I can see that I'll have to go back and re-read the whole thing sometime, because the ending throws new light on the entire book, particularly on the narrator's own doubts regarding her religion. I'd taken quite a few weeks off from reading much of anything very meaningful, partly on purpose and partly because of sheer intellectual laziness, so I must regard this as my first great book of the summer reading season. What to follow it up with, though, that's the problem.