BOOK REVIEWS: Fiction – A melancholy journey
Financial Times; May 27, 2006
By Carmen Callil
HAV
by Jan Morris
Faber £16.99, 288 pages
Jan Morris published Last Letters from Hav 20 years ago. Short-
listed for the Booker Prize, it was – and is – a jewel of a novel,
posturing as a travel book about the magical Hav, a Mediterranean
city-state perched on an imaginary Anatolian peninsula in Asia
Minor. For this new book, Jan Morrishas taken her imagination back
there.
So evocative, detailed and realistic was her first fictional sojourn
in Hav that Last Letters elicited tourist inquiries and agonising map
research – where exactly was it, vis-a-vis Greece and Turkey, Lebanon
and Crete? Studies of post-colonial literature continue to pontificate
about its meanings; allusions in the novel are used to illustrate the
dilemmas of ethnicity and empire.
The fabulous city of Hav was a product of Jan Morris’s unique
combination of talents. Reading her is an almost physical experience;
an encounter with any of her travel writings – the Pax Britannica
trilogy for instance, her chronicle of the British Empire – is to be
whisked into the daily life of other worlds, to loiter alongside her,
to smell, see and encounter exactly what she does.
Nowhere is this more happily achieved than in the original novel. In
it, Jan Morris arrives in Hav in 1985, jumping out of a “huge
locomotive of dirty red with a cow-catcher and a brass bell” at the
frontier, to descend into the entirely plausible melting pot that is
Hav. Over the centuries it has beena bauble for conquest: tossed
about between Greek and Arab, Crusader and Turk, Russia and Germany,
Britain and France, housing myriad races ranging from Italian,
Armenian, African and hippy American to its own cave- dwellers, the
goat-munching Kretevs. Even the Chinese are there in their divine
House ofthe Chinese Master and Palace of Delights.
“Beneath the velvet skies” of the city, its inhabitants eat sea-
urchins by the barrel-load. They run a suicidal race across the roofs
of Hav, a jumbled confusion of architectural testaments to the many
nationalities. The flotsam and jetsam of centuries of foreign
domination provide Morris with the opportunity to use her vast
knowledge to juggle it all in the air and let it fall to the page in
entrancing patterns of wisdom, humour and charm.
While she never descends into outright whimsy, there is nevertheless
more than a touch of W.S. Gilbert in Morris’s fantasy – Sullivan is
representedin the writing, which is a symphony of the melodic phrases
and resonant adjectives that mark her style. A Welsh version of
Gilbert and Sullivan itmust be said, for Jan Morris is snappish about
the joyless British presence in her imagined city.
In 1985, as Jan Morris left Hav, there were black aeroplanes in the
sky and warships on the horizon. It is 2005 when she returns. In her
epilogue she says this sequel is as full of enigmas as its
predecessor, but it is hard to see any lack of clarity in her all-
too-clear account of what the Myrmidons – the new rulers of Hav – have
created after their “Intervention” in 1985. Most of old Hav is now
razed. Gone are the “smells of food, dirt, jasmine and imperfectly
refined gasoline”, replaced by the odourless certainties of the Holy
Myrmidonic Republic. Hav is now meticulously planned, bugged by hidden
devices, with buildings made of glass and steel and so much concrete
that even the dangling earrings of a receptionist seem to be made of
that substance. “All sanitised, all sham”, the fabled peninsula is
now criss-crossed with motorways, its rare fruit “snow raspberries”
are genetically modified and canned, the jumble of history has become
the lies of government, “institutional lying”.
This technological nightmare, one long, vulgar expansion of holiday
resort and airport, is slashed with Offices of Ideology, Leagues of
Intellectualsand an all-seeing 2,000ft Tower. The ideologies of
apartheid and of the US and China seep through Morris’s portrait of
the new Hav, now fully controlled by the Holy Cathars of the
Myrmidonic Republic. (Morris demonstrates her subtle understanding of
history in choosing the believers of this particularly unattractive
Christian heresy as the mindless perpetrators of the Myrmidonic
horrors that are now 21st-century Hav.)
In the epilogue, Morris states she had a sense of foreboding before
the “catastrophe on September 11”, but it is other government
“interventions” that seem to hover in the air in her new vision. This
melancholy contemplation of civilisation as ruled by globalisation and
fundamentalism, with its haunting sense of Welsh rage, offers little
joy and no hope. We must be grateful the original novel is still there
in all its engaging eccentricity, to remind us that its sequel of
despair may only be a hiccup of gloom in the long career of a
distinguished writer who has, perhaps, seen too much.
Carmen Callil is author of “Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family
and Fatherland” (Jonathan Cape).