Charmless Hav

If my memory serves me well—and it occasionally does—I have visited the legendary peninsula of Hav, a place first brought to public attention by Jan Morris in her 1985 book, Last Letters from Hav. Now reissued in a single volume with its sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, the book comes with a clear announcement: "A Novel." I have my doubts about that. Surely those visions of crooked alleyways haunted by drunken poets, disguised celebrities and lost eccentrics were mine too? Did not someone once point out to me an avenue of palms where Nijinsky had performed an impromptu dance, as the old folk do in Hav? I'm sure, too, that I have eaten those Havian specialities snow raspberries and sea urchin soup—I just cannot place the moment.

The Hav of Last Letters is a tantalising brew of east and west, its streets a refuge to ancient heresies, its worn-out palaces and boudoirs echoing with the last sighs of faded empires. In Hav, all manner of customs live on top of each other, an imperfect palimpsest of history where everything is recorded and nothing ever quite erased.

Last Letters made the Booker prize shortlist and many readers hoped that this travel writer's utopia would make a reappearance as the tale ended with Hav on the brink of profound, yet unpredictable, changes. But at the start of the new millennium, Jan Morris said that there would be no more books, fact or fiction. Hav, it seemed, had been banished forever, like an administrative error of a country, arising and departing with the stroke of a pen. Now in the second part of this volume, we have the reprieve.

Hav of the Myrmidons reveals a city that is utterly changed: gone are those teeming, chaotic old quarters and in their place a modern city has been constructed. The streets have been straightened, as has the history; the run-down landmarks have been reborn as tourist attractions. As for the people, they arrive on time when once they would have been spectacularly late. Life is more efficient, more reliable and more remunerative; it is also very much worse.

Take the matter of the roof race. In Last Letters the chapter devoted to the annual competitive scramble over the chimneys and gables of Old Hav was a tour de force. Here was an event that encapsulated the spirit of the place. The young men bounding over roofs and leaping over alleyways. Many were injured, some killed, but none questioned that it was worth it for the chance to receive the victor's golden goblet. In re-enacting the courageous dash by a messenger to a rebel leader during a foreign occupation, the youths drew the community together in a great cathartic gasp of admiration and adrenaline.

Originally run at midnight, the course was so demanding that the death toll grew too large and the Russians, occupying the city in 1882, decreed a dawn start "to the chagrin of those young bloods whose chief pleasure, if we are to believe Tolstoy, lay in seeing the splayed bodies falling through the street-lights to their deaths."

It's that discreet insertion of Tolstoy that marks the irresistible charm of Last Letters: again and again Morris deftly slides in yet another luminary to pooh-pooh any doubts about Hav. There is Freud, searching for eel testes, Trotsky on a "well-documented" sojourn, and Robert Byron with a gem of a diary entry that describes one particularly enchanting Hav building: "Surrounded by the sombre piles of Islam, the House of the Chinese Master burst into our view in a flowering of spectacular eccentricity. It was impossible to leave the city after so brief a glimpse… sighing, we resolved to come back in the morning."

With such faultless mimicry and her ability to evoke place, Morris swings the reader into line: maybe I was there once? Did I view the roof race course? Or did I actually take part? Perhaps that alleyway I leaped across was not in San'a, Jerusalem, or Marrakesh—surely it was Hav.

Sadly, however, the roof race is no more. Catapult forwards in time and see what has happened to the great bloody spectacle in contemporary Hav. The course has been rebuilt to proper health and safety specification, the chimneys downgraded to concrete speed bumps, the great leaps over alleyways shortened and protected with safety ledges and nets. The roof race is now contending for international status; it wants to be an Olympic event. Morris stumbles on a friend from old Hav, now reduced to parroting public relations guff about all the exciting new changes.

If old Hav had charm oozing from its stones, then this new version has nothing but a chilly sterility in which the inhabitants are adrift, unable to live with their former gusto. Everyone knows the place is a sham, yet no one can escape its grip. The fabled snow raspberries over which aficionados drooled for only one day a year are now tasteless impersonators available at any time, their decline in quality matched, inversely, by the growth of hyperbole surrounding them. As Morris wanders, picking up with former friends, one begins to detect why this post-retirement novel had to be written: it's a lament for a lost world and a stinging critique of what has replaced it. In the overplanned and overfunded city we see elements of Dubai and Singapore. In the bland experiences of its inhabitants we see modern Britain and any other state that has sold its cultural reference points to the highest bidder.

Hav of the Myrmidons is a bleak swansong. The seductive world of Old Hav has mutated into a dystopian vision of where the world is heading, a place lacking in character and authenticity—the foundations of good travel writing and also of good living. For anyone wondering why Jan Morris laid her pen down, Hav of the Myrmidons reads like something of an explanation.