HAV A NOVEL
JAN MORRIS
(Faber, £16.99)
by Sarah Hesketh
Last Letters from Hav was first released in 1985. In it, Jan Morris vividly realised the portrait of a nation which had apparently sat at the crossroads of history, absorbing a myriad of cultural influences and peoples.
Morris was best known for her extensive travel writing, (including two books on Oxford) and the book prompted a flood of requests for visa requirements and the exact location of Hav on the Mediterranean.
The majority of Morris's readers had failed to realise that Hav existed only in its author's imagination.
This reissue of the Booker-nominated novella has been expanded to include Hav of the Myrmidons, a new sequence which describes Morris's return to a revolutionised Hav 20 years after her original visit.
The words Hav A Novel are clear on the dust jacket, but this doesn't prevent readers from marvelling at the diverse cast of aging Russian aristocrats, Chinese entrepreneurs, Greek fishermen, cave-dwelling troglodytes and sinister religious figures who inhabit the Hav landscape.
The original Hav was intended as an allegory for the shifting political and historical forces which shaped the international identity of cities such as Danzig.
After 20 years, part one of the book now also functions as an elegy for that expansive cosmopolitanism of the past two centuries, while part two describes a resolutely 21st-century world, ruled by religious fundamentalists guilty of purging the city of its diversity.
This book is compelling and desperately relevant, and Morris remains one of Britain's best, yet often unsung, literary talents.
Fiction HAV A NOVEL JAN MORRIS (Faber, £16.99) Elegy for a lost world d=3,3,1Last Letters from Hav was first released in 1985. In it, Jan Morris vividly realised the portrait of a nation which had apparently sat at the crossroads of history, absorbing a myriad of cultural influences and peoples.
Morris was best known for her extensive travel writing, (including two books on Oxford) and the book prompted a flood of requests for visa requirements and the exact location of Hav on the Mediterranean.
The majority of Morris's readers had failed to realise that Hav existed only in its author's imagination.
This reissue of the Booker-nominated novella has been expanded to include Hav of the Myrmidons, a new sequence which describes Morris's return to a revolutionised Hav 20 years after her original visit.
The words Hav A Novel are clear on the dust jacket, but this doesn't prevent readers from marvelling at the diverse cast of aging Russian aristocrats, Chinese entrepreneurs, Greek fishermen, cave-dwelling troglodytes and sinister religious figures who inhabit the Hav landscape.
The original Hav was intended as an allegory for the shifting political and historical forces which shaped the international identity of cities such as Danzig.
After 20 years, part one of the book now also functions as an elegy for that expansive cosmopolitanism of the past two centuries, while part two describes a resolutely 21st-century world, ruled by religious fundamentalists guilty of purging the city of its diversity.
This book is compelling and desperately relevant, and Morris remains one of Britain's best, yet often unsung, literary talents.
Sarah Hesketh
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