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introduction

When Last Letters from Hav was published (and short-listed
for the Booker Prize) in 1985, Jan Morris’s well-deserved
fame as a travel writer, and the unfamiliarity of many modern
readers with the nature of fiction, caused unexpected dismay
among travel agents. Their clients demanded to know why
they couldn’t book a cheap flight to Hav. The problem, of
course, was not the destination but the place of origin. You
couldn’t get there, in fact, from London or Moscow; but from
ruritania, or orsinia, or the invisible Cities, it was simply a
matter of finding the right train.

now, after twenty years, Morris has returned to Hav, and
enhanced, deepened, and marvelously perplexed her guidebook
by the addition of a final section called “Hav of the Myrmi-
dons.” To say that the result isn’t what the common reader
expects of a novel is not to question its fictionality, which is
absolute, or the author’s imagination, which is vivid and exact.

The story is episodic, entirely lacking in “action” or “plot”
of the usual sort; but these supposed narrative necessities are
fully replaced by the powerful and gathering direction or in-
tention of the book as a whole. it lacks another supposed ne-
cessity of the novel: characters who, while they may represent
an abstraction, also take on a memorable existence of their
own. Like any good travel writer, Morris talks to interesting
people and reports the conversations. and people we met in
the first part of the book turn up in the second part to take us
about and exhibit in person what has happened to their country;

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but i confess i barely remembered their names when i met them
again. Morris’s gift is not portraiture, and her people are mem-
orable not as individuals but as exemplary Havians.

This lack of plot and characters is common in the conven-
tional Utopia, and i expect academics and other pigeonholers
may stick Hav in with Thomas More and company. That is a
respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably
Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying
that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable
type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise
involved are social—ethnology, sociology, political science,
and above all, history. Hav exists as a mirror held up to several
millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs, and politics.
it is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concen-
trates both observation and speculation. Where have we been,
where are we going? Those are the questions the book asks. it
poses them through the invention of a place not recognized in
the atlas or the histories, but which, introduced plausibly and
without violence into the existing world, gives us a distanced,
ironic, and revelatory view of everything around it. The mode
is not satiric fantasy, as in the islands Gulliver visited; it is exu-
berantly realistic, firmly observant, and genuinely knowledge-
able about how things have been, and are now, in saudi arabia,
or Turkey, or Downing street. serious science fiction is a mode
of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the
uses of an alternate geography. if, swayed by the silly snobbery
of pundits as contemptuous of science fiction as they are igno-
rant of it, you should turn away from Hav, that would be a
shame and a loss.

it is not an easy book to describe. Hav itself is not easy to
describe, as the author frequently laments. as she takes us
about with her in her travels of discovery, we grow familiar
with the delightful if somewhat incoherent Hav of 1985. We
climb up to its charming castle, from which the armenian
trumpeter plays at dawn the great lament of Katourian for the

inTroDUCTion · ix

knights of the First Crusade, the “Chant de doleure pour li
proz chevalers qui suent morz.” We visit the Venetian Fondaco,
the Casino, the Caliph, the mysterious British agency, the
Kretevs who inhabit caves up on the great Escarpment through
which the train, Hav’s only land link to the rest of Europe,
plunges daily down a zigzag tunnel. We see the iron Dog, we
watch the thrilling roof-race. But the more we learn, the
greater our need to learn more. a sense of things not under-
stood, matters hidden under the surface, begins to loom; even,
somehow, to menace. We have entered a maze, a labyrinth con-
structed through millennia, leading us back and back to the age
of achilles and the spartans who built the canal and set up the
iron Dog at the harbor mouth, and before that to the measure-
less antiquity of the Kretevs, who are friends of the bear. and
the maze stretches out and out, too, half around the world, for
it seems that Havian poetry was deeply influenced by the
Welsh; and just up the coast is the westernmost of all ancient
Chinese settlements, which Marco Polo found uninteresting.
“There is nothing to be said about Yuan Wen Kuo,” he wrote.
“Let us now move on to other places.”

achilles and Marco Polo aren’t the half of it. ibn Batuta
came to Hav, of course, all the great travelers did, and left their
comments, diligently quoted by the Havians and Morris. T. E.
Lawrence may have discovered a secret mission there; Ernest
Hemingway came to fish and to carry off six-toed cats. Hav’s
glory days of tourism were before the First World War and
again after it, when the train zigzagged through its tunnel
laden with the cream of European society, millionaires, and
right-wing politicians; but whether or not Hitler was actually
there for one night is still a matter of dispute. The politics of
Hav itself in 1985 were extremely disputable. its religions were
various, since so many great powers of the East and West had
governed it over the centuries; mosques and churches coexisted
amicably; and indeed the spiritual scene was so innocuous as to
appear feeble—a small group of hermits, reputed to spend

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their days in holy meditation, proved to be cheerfully selfish
hedonists who simply enjoyed asceticism. and yet, and yet,
there were the Cathars. Late in her first visit, Morris was taken
in darkness and great secrecy to witness a sitting of the Cath-
ars of Hav—a strange ritual conclave of veiled women and
cowled men. in some of them Morris thought she recognized
friends, guides, the trumpeter, the tunnel pilot . . . but she could
not be sure. she could not be sure of anything.

on her return twenty years later, some things appear to be
all too certain. The old Hav is gone, destroyed in an obscure
event called the intervention. The train is gone, a huge airport
is under construction. ships come in to a destination resort
called Lazaretto! (the punctuation is part of the name) of the
most luxuriously banal kind, where, as a middle-aged lady
tourist remarks, one feels so safe. The strange old House of the
Chinese Master is a burnt ruin; the new landmark is a huge
skyscraper called the Myrmidon Tower, “a virtuoso display of
unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity”.
The British Legate is at least as sinister and much slimier than
his predecessor, the British agent. Most of the city has been
rebuilt in concrete. The troglodytic Kretev are housed in hy-
gienic villas, and the bears are extinct. The age of postmodern-
ism has arrived, with its characteristically brutal yet insidious
architecture and propaganda, its reductionist culture of adver-
tisement and imitation, its market capitalism, its factionalism
and religiosity forever threatening terror. Yet we find pretty
soon that Hav is still Hav: the maze, the labyrinth, is still there.
Even the elevator of the Myrmidon Tower is indirect. Who in
fact is running the country? The Cathars? But who are the
Cathars? What does the M on the Myrmidon Tower really
stand for?

Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she’s
not sure what it is about. i don’t take it as an allegory at all. i
read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West

inTroDUCTion · xi

and East in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly
seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of
most of us. its enigmas are part of its accuracy. it is a very good
guidebook, i think, to the early twenty-first century.

—UrsUla K. le GUin