Classic Prizewinner. Macaulay's final novel was published in 1956. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The book's opening sentence is: "Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macauley
Young and immature, I once regarded Peter DeVries’ Blood of the Lamb as unique: a comic novel that treated religion seriously. But after 50 years of reading with some pretentions to taste, I have learned that “one of a kind” is rare.
This novel begins as a comedy. Narrator Laurie accompanies her Anglican Aunt Dot and the narrow Father Chantry-Pigg to Turkey so that they may bring the Anglican word to the Turks and thus improve the lot of Muslim women. Though religious down to her backbone, Laurie, like many middle-aged moderns after World War II, doubts her convictions. Like DeVries in his partly autobiographical novel, McCauley approaches matters and people of faith in a mildly satirical but never sour spirit.
Laurie feels her estrangement from her church due to her long-term affair with a married man. Laurie observes, “Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.”
Issues of faith and doubt aside, this novel also works as a travel narrative. We would expect the author of the amazing survey The Pleasure of Ruins to be skilled in describing the sights of Turkey and the Levant. Well worth reading.
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