I picked up "Towers of Trebizond" mainly because of the title, as I am an avid reader of literature and travel writing on Turley. Macaulay's books seems simple and a good laugh at the first read, but is a book with many layers of meaning. Even the genre of the book is hard to define. On first look it is just a novel, on the second look, it's similar to a travelogue and is no doubt written based on the author's personal experiences. On the third level, it's a dissertation on religion and morality. Through recounting the travels of a group of English missionaries in Turkey, Macaulay brings out the importance of the differences between the East and West, in religion and culture, and also how one sticks to one's impression of the unknown (in this case, Russia) though one has no actual experience or encounter in this regard. The book is illuminating in its discussion of relationships, love, betrayal, friendship, religion and morality and it's ultimately about lives and the choices we make in them. What's right or wrong is not absolute and instead is relative to the environment one lives in. Through the beguiling humour of her characters, Macaulay is able to discuss important issues we confront in our lives without taking sides or being judgemental and leaves us to make our own conclusion about what we value and deem important.

One of the strangest aspect of this excellent book is that the sex of the narrator is left undefined. Most people (including the blurb writer on my edition) assume that Laurie is female, but there is no clear evidence for this; and indeed the adventures described -- in remote rural Turkey in the 1950s -- would be remarkably intrepid for an unaccompanied female. But nowhere is this commented on.

Not only that, but Laurie's lover, Vere, while presumably being male, is never explicitly referred to as such and the author goes to some lengths to avoid using gender specific pronouns.

Which raises the question, whether the "sin" which Laurie is in, and which excludes him/her from the Church, is more serious than heterosexual adultery.

With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of reading pleasure, Macaulay's narrator takes us along on her adventures in northern Turkey with her eccentric, camel-riding Anglican aunt and a grumpy missionary. Her aunt's mission is to study the condition of women in Turkey; the priest's, to convert Muslims; and the narrator's, to draw pictures for her aunt's "Turkey book" and enjoy some travel. This simple premise yields a rich harvest of comic character studies and a gradually unfolding, more serious subtext in which Laurie, the narrator, struggles with her agnosticism and the adultery she has been carrying on for ten years. Macaulay has a wonderfully deadpan writing style marked by compound sentences strung together with "and" and often ending in a short, droll phrase. She is so amusing that you hardly notice how emotionally reserved her narrator is, as she recounts her Anatolian adventures with and without her aunt and the priest - exploring Trebizond, heading into the mountains in search of good fishing, alone on the camel with a high fever and money running out, cadging favors from a fellow Brit whose personal duplicity she has discovered and could expose, meeting her mother and her mother's wealthy "protector" by chance in Syria, and traveling to Jerusalem. Until it's back in print, find it at the library or through used book sellers.

The best thing about the Rose Macaulay novels for me is the depth of attention she gives to her characters, both in creating them and exploring them through the books. The central character here, Denham Dobie, is particularly prominent because she is a socially inept, utterly straightforward induvidualist against the background of a very worldly, cultured society, which she is abruptly thrown into on the death of her father. The author isn't afraid to point out her essentially self-absorbed character either. The plot of the novel is essentially to do with Denham and her cultured new relatives coming to terms with each other, but the author has some very painful and affecting things to say on the way on subjects like the relationship of love to induvidual freedom. The prose is as clean and clever as always, especially in contrast to that of some of the characters.

This book is a collection of five lectures given in 1960 by the author, Douglas Stewart. Each lecture focuses on the unifying religious themes in five 20th Century authors: James Joyce (apocalytypticism), Aldous Huxley (mysticism), Graham Greene (Catholicism), Rose Macauley (Anglicanism) and Joyce Cary (Protestantism).

Stewart writes well in impressive, quotable language. He also weaves in comparisons of the featured novelists to other great writers. I can see where this book would be useful to someone writing a research paper. However, for someone like me who is just looking for insight into a couple of great minds from the past century, there really isn't anything earth-shattering in this book. Yes, James Joyce's rejection of religion, particularly Catholism, is apparent in his works. Yes, mystical union with God (which Stewart calls "detachment") is pervasive in Aldous Huxley's works. Yes, Graham Greene's work portrays characters whose lives conflict with their Catholicism. I didn't find much in these lectures that wasn't obvious.

Stewart did issue an intriguing challenge concerning the works of Aldous Huxley -- he claims that a chronological reading of Huxley's works will demonstrate Huxley's spiritual journey to increasing detachment and pessimism. I'm no expert on Huxley, but from what I've read, I see just the opposite -- a journey from the utter hopelessness seen in his early novels to the meaningful, rich and happy inner life implicit in the later novels and explicit in his religious essays.