Book Review
(Published in Traveller, June 2006)
Jan Morris wrote Last Letters from Hav in 1985. With this, her
first novel, she created an imaginary land, which was both magical and
bewildering, her response to a world she was increasingly finding “ominously
opaque”. Twenty years on, she has augmented the vision with Hav
of the Myrmidons, a travelogue that traces her return to the country
over six days. Together, the two form Hav: a novel that explores the potential
of fantasy travel, at the same time provoking thought upon what it is
to live in the 21st century.
Part one has a distinctly Utopian feel to it, as Morris discovers Hav,
with its multi-cultural mesh of history and its disjointed but striking
identity. She supports her descriptions with invented literary quotation,
and teases by placing the imagined country in real contexts. Morris created
a place so authentic and so appealing that when the book was first published,
she received countless enquiries as to Hav’s exact location.
There is nothing appealing, however, about the dystopian Hav of part
two. The country has been completely reconstructed following the mysterious
“intervention” of a modern version of Achilles’ faceless
henchmen, with which her 1985 visit ended. But with the reconstruction
has come modernisation and bland uniformity, as the unique culture of
Hav is lost to a past that is being systematically erased from the public
memory.
Hav, the place, is representative of everywhere, and yet is nowhere. While this can cause disorientation, Hav has a portentous aspect that makes it relevant reading for us all.