How do we classify this unusual book called Hav ? Author Jan Morris refers to it as an allegory, but is less forthcoming about what her allegory represents. Ursula K. Le Guin, for her part, prefers to describe Hav as science fiction—but there isn't much science here, and surprisingly little deference to the usual modes of fiction. Some readers have even assumed that the book is non-fiction, and pestered the author for information on how to visit Hav. I think "alternative history" might be a better label, but best of all would be "alternative geography"—except for he unfortunate fact that there is no fiction genre called alternative geography.
In other words, Jan Morris has written a novel that is in a class by itself…but only because no one else got admitted to the class.
Morris, by trade, is not a novelist, but rather a travel writer—and ranks among the finest of her generation. She has written acclaimed book-length studies of Hong Kong, Oxford, Trieste, Sydney, Venice, and other locales. So who can be surprised that, when Morris decided to turn her hand to fiction, she wrote a novel in the form of a travel book. But with one catch: the city of Hav doesn’t exist. Her novel is the account of imaginary visits to make-believe locales.
Yet her narrative possesses such intense realism that you can well understand the confusion of the member of the Royal Geographic Society who contacted Morris hoping for guidance in finding Hav on the map. Of course, it appears on no map, but you can almost imagine where it would reside on a globe, a gateway between East and West, a conduit on important waterways and trade routes, centrally located in the center of things, yet also off the beaten track, easy to ignore and neglect.
This novel was originally written as two separate narratives, published more than two decades apart. The first two-thirds of the book were issued under the name Last Letters from Hav in 1985, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Morris published a lengthy coda entitled Hav of the Myrmidons in 2006, and both works now reside a single volume entitled Hav . The two narratives combine seamlessly into a coherent novel, and I suspect that many readers wouldn’t be aware that more than quarter century separated their writing.
Morris offers a peculiar, but persuasive, explanation for why she turned to fiction to create a work of travel literature. "I had come to realize that I really seldom knew what I was writing about," she admits. "I did not truly understand the multitudinous forces—political, economic, historical, social, moral, mythical — that worked away beneath the forces of all societies. I blundered around the planet, groping for meanings but not often absolutely understanding them, and working only with an artist’s often misguided intuition." Her goal with her letters from Hav was to embrace this sense of mystery, to show that vibrant communities possess a concatenation of significations and forces that resist reduction into travel book spiel.
That’s an extraordinary self-effacing admission from a travel writer of the highest order. I will pass over the issues of whether this sense of humility (very rare in Morris’s generation, but perhaps even rarer now when blustering certainty is the calling-card of punditry of any sort) may have actually contributed to Morris’s superiority as an interpreter of various cultures. I am dealing with Hav now, not Hong Kong or Venice, and here Morris has achieved something quite magical. She has written an account that probes into the enigma of an unfamiliar place, but actually adds to the mystery the more it probes. The impact on the reader is akin to the effect of reading a detective story, only to find more corpses in the final chapter, and all the suspects possessing air-tight alibis.
Hav , you see, has no shortage of perpetrators, sometimes in the guise of individuals—a tight-lipped port master, an effusive and discreet casino manager, a caliph-in-exile, a British consul who doubles as a spy, a wealthy import-export agent with inexplicable sources of revenue, etc.—but more often in the form of traditions, some of them dating back to Marco Polo, the Crusaders, Alexander the Great, and even further back to (is it possible?) the great Achilles himself. On the surface, Hav is a busy multicultural city-state, a model of tolerance where different races and religions coexist and often collaborate in all spheres of civic and private life. But the longer our narrator (named Jan Morris, by the way) spends in the Hav, the more she realizes that hidden tensions and conflicting ambitions undergird almost everything she sees.
Morris (the author, not the character) has mentioned that the events of 9-11 contributed to her interest in returning to the subject of Hav, and continuing the story she had begun in 1980s. It would be going too far to claim that Morris anticipated the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and changed the face of modern geopolitics. But she deserves absolute acclaim for grasping the kind of submerged conflict in world views that can manifest itself in an instant, and permanently shift the dynamics of everyday life.
This is a deep book, and deserves careful reading. But I fear that Morris has taken a path here that most readers will resist. People read books for two main reasons. The close-minded read in order to confirm that they already possess all the answers. The more open-minded read in order to expand their knowledge of the world. But Morris is bypassing both of those groups, and hoping to entice a third category of readers: those who are willing to immerse themselves in a subject in order to realize how profound the mystery really is. This is a tiny subset of individuals—people who can truly echo Socrates’s boast that all he knew was that he knew nothing. Don’t dismiss that Socratic ultra-minority out of hand: the cultivation of mystery can bring both aesthetic and pragmatic insights inaccessible to others with more confidence in their explanatory models.
I recall a few other works of fiction that have celebrated the deep, unfathomable nature of human relations—their ranks include Henry James The Ambassadors , James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea , Soren Kierkegaard's Repetition —and I mull over the incomprehension (if not outright) hostility they have sometimes evoked. No, there isn't much of a market for books like Hav. But there is a need, a pressing one at that. So even if I admit that Hav may have a miniscule target market—if I can borrow the publishing industry term—at least it is in excellent company.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).