Reading: Hav
May. 15th, 2020 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartJan Morris is best known as a travel writer, and at first glance Hav appears to be a travel book; an account of her visits to the city-state of Hav, located on a peninsula on the southern coast of Asia Minor, cut off from the mainland by a steep escarpment, occupied variously by Greeks, Crusaders, Arabs, Venetians, Ottoman Turks, Russians,the British and the League of Nations during the centuries of its history and reflecting this mixed heritage in its culture and architecture. However, you can't find Hav on any maps of the eastern Mediterranean, and in fact, this is a novel disguised as a travel book, an examination of history, culture and the state of the world through one imagined microcosm.
The first part, Last Letters from Hav, was published in 1985 (I actually own a copy which I read some time in the early 90s). It takes the form of weekly letters written for publication as a newspaper series over a period of six months, from March to August 1985, telling of Morris's experience as she arrives in the city and comes to know its inhabitants. Morris uses her knowledge of the history and culture of the Mediterranean to create a wonderfully authentic portrait of the city, full of local details and interesting characters, beautifully written and vividly evoked.
Morris's 1985 visit to Hav ends abruptly as the country is gripped by political disturbances; there are shootings one night, mysterious black aircraft fly low over the city, and from the summit of the escarpment as she leaves the country she sees warships on the horizon heading for the city. The second part of the novel, Hav of the Myrmidons, was added in 2005 and recounts the story of a return visit in that year, when Morris is able to see for herself the aftereffects of the 'Intervention' and the subsequent establishment of a theocracy. She finds a very different Hav, cut adrift from its history and instead become the epitome 21st-century global capitalism. In the course of this second visit, Morris encounters many old acquaintances from her first trip, and finds many echoes of the earlier visit. If Last Letters from Hav is a wistful look back at a world on the verge of cataclysmic change, Hav of the Myrmidons is a much sharper picture of the changed world, and the juxtaposition of the two seems to really get to the heart of the nature of the 21st century.
All in all, I enjoyed Hav a great deal, and because it feels so much like a travel book I managed to sneak it past my lockdown brain which is mostly finding it hard to read fiction (even if it did take me nearly two weeks to read less than 300 pages, which is also a sign of where my brain currently is. I miss being able to immerse myself in a fictional world.)
The first part, Last Letters from Hav, was published in 1985 (I actually own a copy which I read some time in the early 90s). It takes the form of weekly letters written for publication as a newspaper series over a period of six months, from March to August 1985, telling of Morris's experience as she arrives in the city and comes to know its inhabitants. Morris uses her knowledge of the history and culture of the Mediterranean to create a wonderfully authentic portrait of the city, full of local details and interesting characters, beautifully written and vividly evoked.
Morris's 1985 visit to Hav ends abruptly as the country is gripped by political disturbances; there are shootings one night, mysterious black aircraft fly low over the city, and from the summit of the escarpment as she leaves the country she sees warships on the horizon heading for the city. The second part of the novel, Hav of the Myrmidons, was added in 2005 and recounts the story of a return visit in that year, when Morris is able to see for herself the aftereffects of the 'Intervention' and the subsequent establishment of a theocracy. She finds a very different Hav, cut adrift from its history and instead become the epitome 21st-century global capitalism. In the course of this second visit, Morris encounters many old acquaintances from her first trip, and finds many echoes of the earlier visit. If Last Letters from Hav is a wistful look back at a world on the verge of cataclysmic change, Hav of the Myrmidons is a much sharper picture of the changed world, and the juxtaposition of the two seems to really get to the heart of the nature of the 21st century.
All in all, I enjoyed Hav a great deal, and because it feels so much like a travel book I managed to sneak it past my lockdown brain which is mostly finding it hard to read fiction (even if it did take me nearly two weeks to read less than 300 pages, which is also a sign of where my brain currently is. I miss being able to immerse myself in a fictional world.)
