Monthly Online Book Review and Listings Magazine ~ May 2009
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OUTSIDERS LOOKING IN
by Jerry Dowlen
Isolation and Friendship in ‘The Towers of
‘The
Sex. Religion. Laurie, artist
and traveller in ‘The Towers of Trebizond’ has much in common with Dora,
another artist, in ‘The Bell’. They are both outsiders looking in. What are we
to make of them? Do we sympathise with their independence of thought and deed,
or is it thumbs-down for these 1950s fictional femmes fatales because of
their exasperating selfishness?
‘The Towers of Trebizond’
To me the first very striking feature of this book is the author’s distinctive style of writing extremely long sentences. At times, her sentences totter on the edge of a precipice and are perilously near to collapse. But somehow, every time, almost Houdini-like, the author comes up trumps with a comma or semi-colon that skates across enough thin ice to extend the sentence further … and sometimes further … and sometimes (pant, pant, because if you are trying to read it out loud you’ll have become desperate for breath) further!
Here is an example that comes very early in the story – almost immediately after Laurie introduces us to the camel owned by her irrepressible Aunt Dot:
I did not care for the camel, nor the camel for me, but, as I was staying with Aunt Dot, I did what she bade me, and dragged the camel by its bridle to the shed which it shared with my little Austin and, till lately, with my Aunt’s Morris, but this car had been stolen from her by some Anglican bishop from outside the Athenaeum annexe while she was dining there one evening with Professor Gilbert Murray and Archbishop David Mathew.
Laurie informs us next:
The camel took Aunt Dot to church, but not the Austin me. My Aunt was a regular church-goer, which I was not. She was a high Anglican, not belonging, therefore, to that great middle section of the Church of England which is said to be the religious backbone (so far as it has one) of our nation. I am too high, even extreme, but somewhat lapsed, which is a sound position, as you belong to the best section of the best branch of the Christian Church, but seldom attend its services.
This sets out Laurie’s stall in the story as a person whose religious belief and practice places her as an outsider looking in – musing at anomalies in the teachings of the Anglican Prayer Book, pondering the definition of sin, and debating whether churches should rightfully possess rich ornaments.
Presented at first as a character who seems to be superficial and light-hearted, Laurie suddenly receives a sharp slap across the chops, and we are pitched into a poignant dimension of her life’s story:
Father Chantry-Pigg came and stood by me and said: “How much longer are you going to go on like this, shutting the door against God?”
This question always disturbed me; I sometimes asked it of myself, but I did not know the answer. Perhaps it would have to be for always, for I was so deeply committed to something else that I could not break away.
We learn then from Laurie that her childhood and early youth saw her move from religious instruction to doubt and then to take up the Church again, until:
The Church met its Waterloo when I took up with adultery … and this adultery lasted on and on, and I was still in it now, steaming down the Black Sea to Trebizond, and I saw no prospect of its ending except with death – the death of one of three people, and perhaps it would be my own. … So really agnosticism (Anglo or other) seemed the only refuge …
Laurie joins a small travelling
group, led by Aunt Dot. Their key destination in
‘The
At
the start of the story Dora Greenfield joins her husband Paul at the fictional
Even
before Dora's arrival at Imber we sense great forebodings of doom. Her trials
begin with an uncomfortable train journey from
An agitated Dora leaves her suitcase behind on the train. Having no new clothes to change into she has great difficulty complying with the rigidly spartan dress code at Imber where on her first day she is bustled into an afternoon prayer-meeting. She causes it to be interrupted because the visiting nun from the next-door abbey becomes agitated to see that Dora's head is uncovered. After some frantic whispering and hissing and blushing Dora is cajoled into producing a none-too-clean handkerchief from her handbag and placing it on her head.
Dora's discomfort increases:
Resisting the pious atmosphere she threw her head well back and looked around the room. ... She clutched the back of the chair in front. The Latin mumbling went on. Dora became conscious that her skirt was intolerably tight and that a ladder was slowly spreading down one of her stockings. Her feet were hurting and she became suddenly aware that it is extremely uncomfortable to kneel with high-heeled shoes on. She began to look distractedly about the room. She could not see it as a chapel. It was a shabby derelict pitiable drawing-room, harbouring an alien rite, half sinister, half-ludicrous. Dora drew a deep breath and rose to her feet. She whipped the idiotic handkerchief from her head and walked quietly to the door and out.
With this first act of mental and physical rebellion Dora is established as a fish out of water among the small religious sect. She afterwards remains "restless and rejected".
Whereas Laurie in 'The Towers of Trebizond' has derived her outsider-looking-in rationale from a considered study of religious theory and practice it would seem that Dora's indifference to religious devotion results simply from her youth and immaturity. (We are told that Dora has "lost her religion", but this information is not elaborated upon).
Dora's situation in 'The Bell' tracks that of Laurie in 'Trebizond' as regards each of them finding herself in the company of a group of intense-minded individuals who are fixed upon self-appointed missions that they hold to be worthy and high-principled.
Ahead
of her journey, Laurie reveals: "I meant to explore
Dora is the one who defaults into idle pleasure. It doesn't occur to her to be active or purposeful at Imber until, exemplifying the dictum that "The Devil makes work for idle hands" she stumbles into intrigue and subversion, launching the story's core plot that builds compellingly and inexorably to the tragic-comic destruction of the lay community.
When I watched the BBC television serialisation of ‘The Bell’ in 1982, I was mesmerised by Dora’s mischievous charm. The cause of my hypnosis, I have no doubt, was the glamour and élan that the actress Tessa Peake-Jones brought to the role. I happily overlooked the sobering reality that Michael Meade, the leader of the lay community, privately referred to Dora as “a bitch”.
The Themes of Friendship andLove in ‘
One of the finest qualities of ‘The Towers of Trebizond’ is Laura's insightful musings upon life, sex and love. In 'The Bell' too it is the theme of friendship and love that I find to be the most imploring and touching part of the story.
Rose McCaulay was considered by her friends in real life to be a sexually ambivalent person – perhaps to the point of self-denial. In fact, for many years she had a secret liaison with a former Catholic priest. This no doubt explains how Laurie can give us such a poignant description of one of her precious getaways with Vere:
… Love was our fortress and our peace, and being together shut out everything else and closed down conscience and the moral sense.
In ‘The Bell’ a serene final
phase of the story sees Dora and Michael Meade briefly drawn together in late
autumn after the shut-down of Imber. All the other members of the fractured and
warring group have departed to seek pastures new. Michael remains behind for a
few weeks to wrap up all the administration. Dora hangs on too, having decided
not to return to
Played from the heart by the actor Ian Holm in the BBC television series, Michael Meade in ‘The Bell’ carries an echo of Laura in ‘Trebizond’ in the sense that they each consider full religious conversion to be unattainable because of personal weakness.
Laura’s stumbling-block is her adulterous relationship with Vere. Michael’s baggage is the recurring lapses of homosexual lust that keep him in a life-cycle of building up a career that he is forced to resign, thereafter reinventing himself somewhere new where his past is unknown.
During this time, a curious relationship grew up between Michael and Dora, something undefined and wistful that had for Michael a certain ease and douceur. Perhaps this was possible only because they both knew that time was short.
The friendship between Dora
and Michael is indeed short-lived. At this point of the story we find a link
between Michael in ‘The Bell’ and Laura in ‘
Laurie’s narration of her
holiday with Vere in
It was the best week we ever had, and there will not
be another. I mean by best that it was full of fun and gaiety and beauty and
glamour, all the things that
I can’t think of a better phrase than “shining fountain” to describe two wonderful books: ‘The Towers of Trebizond’ and ‘The Bell’.
Jerry Dowlen
February 2009
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