Evandar

Jan Morris (1926-2020) was a Welsh writer known primarily for histories and travelogues published both before and after her gender transition in the late 1960s. In her time she traveled just about everywhere in the world; as a journalist she accompanied the Mount Everest expedition of 1953, waiting at a camp at 22,000 feet elevation to be the first to report that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had reached the summit.

Hav is one of her few published pieces of fiction, a travelogue of an imagined visit to an invented country. Morris placed her fictional land on a tiny peninsula jutting off Anatolia, and made it a crossroads where all the peoples and powers of the Mediterranean and beyond have come and left their mark through conquest and trade, and have continued to leverage its unique political position for their own gain. This omnibus edition includes the 1985 novel Last Letters from Hav and its sequel, 2006's Hav of the Myrmidons, which imagines a return visit to see how Hav has changed two decades on and where it sits in the post-9/11 world.

Apparently when Last Letters from Hav was first published, there was a bit of a "War of the Worlds" situation where many readers completely missed that it was fiction and ran right out to try to book a flight to Hav. I can understand how this happened, not just because Morris was known for nonfiction and before the internet people couldn't easily look these things up, but also because the book is so totally convincing as a depiction of a real place. Its episodic narrative gathers threads of all the real places Morris had been to and weaves them together elaborately but naturally into a multicultural knot—Turkish and Greek, British and Chinese, Christian and Muslim—that feels like it could have been, even though it never was.

The book doesn't make sweeping changes to real-world history to accommodate Hav's existence, but it makes tweaks and adjustments here and there to slip Hav in as an influence on all kinds of things. Morris creates connections everywhere (it's a common belief that Hav was the site of ancient Troy) and it seems that almost every interesting figure in history visited Hav at some point. Freud's stay in Hav as a young man inspired some of his later important works, and of course when Hemingway departed he took with him some of Hav's famous polydactyl cats. Sometimes Morris quotes passages about Hav from real writers' works, and in 1985, unless you had that exact book on the shelf, could you be sure that quote wasn't in there? I think some of them might even be real quotations that she has cleverly recontextualized to sound like they're about Hav, and with such forthright authoritativeness that you want to believe her.

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