The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

It's always a surprise, reading the supposedly-funny books of the past. Some of them still work - for at least some modern readers, and remembering they weren't ever funny for everyone anyway - and some of them can fall into that weird netherworld where the reader can't even figure out what was supposed to be funny.

The Towers of Trebizond is a 1956 novel by Rose Macaulay - the last-published book of a writer born in 1881, a voice-driven book largely about varieties of Christianity and the problems of faith, taking the form of a travel book and mildly satirizing the contemporary world of the travel writer along the way. That's the kind of thing that could easily feel very old-fashioned and fall flat today.

I don't know that I took all of the religious convolutions as seriously as I might have, but the comic material still worked for me, and the narrator's voice - the long run-on sentences piling up like logjams, circling every side of a question endlessly - was lovely, amusing, and deeply engaging in a way I really didn't expect such long sentences and paragraphs could be.

The voice is what makes it work, I think: the characters are mostly driven by manias, from the formidable feminist and Anglican would-be missionary Aunt Dot to her traveling partner, the far-too-High Church Father Chantry-Pigg, to all of the various oddball secondary characters this small group of English people meet in their travels across Turkey, supposedly trying to see if there's scope for a major missionary outreach to bring the locals to the Anglican Church. Laurie, the narrator, is a generation younger than Dot, just as tangled up in doctrinal questions but in a funnier way, and is presenting all of this in her long-winded, show-all-sides-of-the-question narrative to an unknown audience.

(Laurie and Dot are supposedly writing a book about their trip, but Towers of Trebizond is nothing like that book - Laurie's contributions were largely to be illustrations, which the novel doesn't include at all. It could, perhaps, be seen as an expanded, standalone version of the additional prose Laurie was expecting to contribute, the more travel-related material, if the reader is prepared to be very generous.)

"Group of obsessives go somewhere and bounce off the locals" is a time-tested comic plot, and Macaulay gets some good material out of it here. Though, again, this book is so heavily narrated that the bouncing is somewhat muted - this is a book that's funnier about how Laurie tells the reader what happened than about what actually happened. There are amusing moments, and lots of quirky characters, but this is a lightly plotted book - just a succession of day-to-day events, mostly small, that happen to a small cast.

Macaulay does manage to have unexpected emotional depth in her ending, which is mostly unrelated to the rest of the book plot-wise, but deeply connected to her thematic material. And I should also probably mention that Laurie - though in this book at least thirty or forty years younger than her creator - is very much an author insert, and the material of Laurie's life and background is drawn closely from Macaulay's. So this is the kind of comic novel with unexpected depths, the kind that is, at its core, serious about its religious questions without needing to keep them free from ridicule.

Is it still funny, almost seventy years later? I thought so: that's all I can tell you. This sat on my shelf for a decade, as a weird thing I thought I might want to read. Now it's a weird thing I did read, and I'm happy I did so. It's funny but not just funny, and the religious material is handled skillfully and is less parochial than I was worried it would be. You may feel the same.