A very enjoyable read.
I loved the long ponderous sentences and long never-ending lists, often ending with something/someone obscure.
Written in a very tongue in cheek style but with the underlying serious problem of the many waring religions and committing one’s life to Christ.
Aunt Dot, who was looking for a home for what she called "all those poor young unmarried fathers, ruined by maintenance," p11
Of course from one point of view she was right about the church, which grew so far, almost it once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made a small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by a certain people and stamped out heresies was such cruelty and rage. … p196 ( )

I don't want to put anyone off, but I think that readers will miss some of the humour in The Towers of Trebizond if they don't have enough background knowledge. Let me try to explain, with the help of Wikipedia (lightly edited as usual to remove unnecessary links).

Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (1 August 1881 – 30 October 1958) was an English writer, most noted for her award-winning novel The Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography, reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs.

Well, yes it is, but that description (apart from the camel) makes it sound earnest and boring. The truth is that most of the time Macaulay is poking fun at religion in general and at hers in particular. It is often laugh-out-loud funny, but as I can see from reviews at Goodreads not everyone gets the joke.

Some will be put off by the beginning. It starts with her faux-naïve narrator's drollery about how her family navigated centuries of the fraught history of the church in England — and that relies on having some knowledge of British kings and queens and their hangers on and how they bumped each other off to suit the religious beliefs prevailing in their era; and on knowing something about church politics. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy would help with some but not all of this.

I knew about enough about English church politics because I have read Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855-1867)...

... and I have also read Susan Howatch's Starbridge series (1987-1994) which is a family saga that traces the history of the Church of England... but it's also (more interestingly) about the same kind of ambitious shenanigans and scandals and human greed and theological argy-bargy that you find in Trollope. Both of these series are excellent reading, but... well, not a lot of people read the classics these days and my guess is that the appeal of the once best-selling Howatch series has faded.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/06/26/the-towers-of-trebizond-1956-by-rose-macaule... ( )

Las torres de Trebisonda cuenta las peripecias de un estrambótico grupo, formado por Laurie, la narradora, su inimitable tía Dot, el intolerante padre Chantry-Pigg y un camello loco, que parte de Inglaterra rumbo a Oriente Medio movido por distintos intereses que van desde un heterodoxo proselitismo anglicano al puro placer del viaje. Ingeniosa y a la vez melancólica, desenfadada y sutil, esta novela descubre una ciudad de fábula, una Trebisonda reflejo de inquietudes espirituales, metáfora del carácter esquivo de la verdad. Un relato satírico y en ocasiones absurdo, de un humor chispeante, tras el que se esconden las sombras del desengaño, los dilemas religiosos y el recuerdo de un amor perdido.

Some of this was entertaining, some was exhausting (all the discourse about the church), and the story with Vere and the ending felt tacked on, like she couldn't quite figure out how to shape the travelogue into a novel. Also, is Laurie a man or a woman? Parts of the story didn't really work if Laurie was male, while other parts didn't really work if Laurie was female. ( )

I wanted to love this book. The first 100 pages or so were uproarious and charming, and the Anglo-Catholic humor was amusing, but once I was left alone with Laurie, much of the appeal was sucked out of the narrative for me, even the actual travel bits. His stream-of-consciousness religious musings grew tiresome quickly. (Obviously I'm reading Laurie as a man. I thought he was Dot's niece for the first half of the book, then was disconcerted to realize I'd probably been getting that wrong for chapters.) ( )