Hav (review)
As book reviews go, this one's mainly an exhortation to read what I see as a criminally underrated book (I think I would need at least two more readings to 'get' it enough to offer anything truly insightful). I read it back in January of this year and meant to write a review but never quite found the time. Eight months later, it still lives rent-free in my head.
Jan Morris is known primarily for her history & travel writings (including firsthand reporting of Edmund Hilary's Everest expedition), and for the seminal trans memoir Conundrum.1 Hav is just one entry amongst her huge corpus of travel memoirs, distinguished primarily by the fact that its subject matter isn't "real".
The central conceit is that Hav is a peninsular city-state somewhere along the southern coast of Turkey. (Real-world touchstones include Malta, Trieste, Venice, Montenegro, & Monaco). It has a richly-layered history, beginning with indigenous inhabitants ("Kretevs"), a brief stint as a crusader state, conquest by Saladin, use by the Russian empire as a summer resort for Tsarist aristocrats, inclusion in the British Empire, international administration by the League of Nations, and eventually tenuous independence.
There isn't exactly a plot; each chapter focuses on a neighborhood or personage in Hav. The writing flits between amusing anecdotes & erudite digressions on history (real & fake). There's too much here to adequately cover in a blog post, but favorites include a Russian resort where Diaghilev courted Nijinsky, an Armenian trumpeter whose lamentation so moved Saladin that it's still played today, a deadly annual footrace across Hav's rooftops, a guy who is weirdly invested in whether or not Hitler ever visited Hav,2 the nominal caliph of a miniscule Islamic sect, a statue of an iron dog allegedly graffitied by Marco Polo, the tasting of elusive snow-raspberries foraged by cave-dwelling indigenous Kretevs, & the strange relationship that people has with a rare species of bear.
At times, Morris goes full-Borges3 as with her description of the enigmatic "House of the Chinese Master":
This on its own would be delightful, but what keeps Hav firmly entrenched in my memory is a prevailing mood of inscrutable forces acting under the surface - a Pynchonesque feeling of indefinitely layered conspiracy. If Hav has a plot, it's one that even its perspicacious narrator can only follow obliquely.
As Morris explores the city, we get hints of something amiss. The nominally Greek inhabitants of San Spiridon seem… off somehow.4 The British ambassador (rumored to be MI6) brushes her off inexplicably, then sends a telegram warning her to leave. The number of SMG-toting guards slowly ticks upwards. Venetian-school paintings are vandalized. A taxi driver offers her a fleeting glimpse of a clandestine meeting of the city's "cathar" sect. Shortly before Morris finally departs over the mountainous Turkish border, black fighter jets cruise low over the peninsula.
This brings us to the novel's eerie sequel/coda. Twenty years after her 1986 sojourn, she relates impressions for a six-day visit to modern Hav. We learn that immediately after her departure, Hav suffered something known only as the "intervention". Now, it's a glossy ultra-modern gnostic theocracy (?!), dominated by an enormous skyscraper called the Myrmidonic Tower.5 Hav's famous snow raspberries have been genetically modified for mass production. The roof-race is a candidate for the 2012 Olympics. The Kretevs have been relocated from their escarpment caves to air-conditioned apartment blocks, foreigners are mostly relegated to a glitzy resort called "Lazaretto!" ("an exclamatory experience"). If the old Hav was pseudo-Trieste, this version resembles Dubai, Baku, or Tel Aviv.
But just as modern Hav was prefigured in tantalizing glimpses, so Hav's past survives in fragmentary remnants. Old friends welcome back "Dirleddy Jan". The iron dog still stands over the harbor (albeit now with 'cyber-graffiti' -- did Morris predict the QR code?). Imagery of the labyrinth crops up in strange places. What does it all mean?
This is somewhat atypical inspiration for most table-top games. There's no 'adventure', strictly speaking. The world is imaginary, but in isolation no single element is truly fantastical. But what Hav pulls off brilliantly is one of the core pieces of sleight-of-hand underpinning a ttrpg: the shimmering illusion of a an entire world conjured from tightly constrained, well-chosen details. I feel like I've been to Hav, images from it feel almost as real as some of my own memories from traveling Europe. And when I fumble through my own adventure-writing efforts, I find myself asking: what would Jan do?
Who cares? one soon comes to feel. Who cares if Missakian sounds his trumpet on the rampart? Who cares if the train is late, or what the Prefects did? Who cares if the gun goes off? Only the city itself, whose memories are so long, whose character is so elaborately creased or layered, and whose idiosyncratic attitudes I find myself all too easily adapting.
It also comports with my grouchy opinion that good worldbuilding should be ultimately inscrutable & baffling -- if the setting you've devised can be understood through the workings of a rational system, it's not realistic. What Hav captures so beautifully is the sense of indefinitely many interlocking systems, the sum total of which is too much for any one person to grasp.
The great 'M'! 'M' for what? 'M' really for Myrmidon, or 'M' for Mammon? For Mohammed the prophet? For Mani the Manichean? 'M' for Macdonald's, or Monsanto, or Microsoft? 'M' for Melchick? 'M' for Minoan? 'M' for Maze? Or could it possibly be, I wondered as we droned through the darkness, and I fell into an uneasy slumber, 'M' for Me?
So anyways, if you're a fan of unique invented worlds in general, or of 'modern' fantasy (e.g. China Mieville or Disco Elysium), if you want to witness a masterclass in weaving an invented place into real history, and/or if you want to round out your reading with more LGBTQ+ writers, you absolutely owe it to yourself to read Hav.
Two things to note here. First, Morris is a masterful prose stylist; Hav clearly benefits from a long career spent mastering the art of travel writing. Second, Morris is trans, and wrote Hav after transitioning. This fact is incidental to the manifest content of the book, and I only mention it because I regard seeking out books by LGBTQ authors as a worthy endeavor, and I suspect readers of this blog do as well. If it has some bearing on latent content in the book, I must leave such readings to those better trained to unearth them.↩
It is confirmed that Mussolini did.↩
There's a character named Dr. Borge who frequents the Athenaeum, Hav's main hangout for intellectuals.↩
"Today I mentioned these peculiar sensations to Dr. Borge, as we lunched together at the Al-Asima, in the Great Bazaar. He looked at me in a penetrating way. 'You are walking on quicksands,' he said. 'I will say no more.'"↩
The way Morris describes the post-war modernization of Hav is particularly chilling in light of recent 'development' plans for post-genocide Gaza.↩