Takoma Park Book Club November - Memoirs

The Towers of Trebizond is our pick for November. From Wikipedia: The Towers of Trebizond is a novel published in 1956 by the English novelist, biographer and traveller Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The last of her novels, The Towers of Trebizond is also Macaulay's most successful. Widely regarded as her masterpiece, it was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1956. More: The book is largely autobiographical. It follows the adventures of a group of people, the eccentric Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett (otherwise Aunt Dot), her High Anglican clergyman friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg (who keeps his collection of sacred relics in his pockets), and the narrator, Laurie, travelling from Istanbul (or Constantinople as Fr. Chantry-Pigg would have it) to Trebizond. A Turkish feminist doctor attracted to Anglicanism acts as a foil to the main characters. On the way, they meet magicians, difficult Turkish policemen, juvenile British authors, and observe the BBC and Billy Graham on tour. Aunt Dot proposes to emancipate the women of Turkey by converting them to Anglicanism and popularizing the bathing hat, while Laurie has more worldly preoccupations. Historical references (English Christianity since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, nineteenth-century travellers to the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, The Fourth Crusade, St. Paul's Third Missionary Journey, Troy) abound. The geographical canvas is enlarged with the two senior characters eloping to the Soviet Union and the heroine meeting up with her semi-estranged mother in Jerusalem. The final chapters after the fatal accident on the return journey are played out in a very English setting raising multiple minor issues such as the souls of animals.