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language: English
country: UK
year: 1985
form: novel
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 24.2.23-28.2.23
I’m of two minds about Jan Morris’s Last Letters from Hav. it is, on the one hand, closely tailored to my personal interests: a fictional travelogue through the peninsular city-state of Hav, located ambiguously somewhere between Cilicia, the Ionian coast, and the Balkans, full of weird colonial arrangements and overlapping histories (a League of Nations mandate condominium!), the fringes of Ottoman history, weird religious stuff, navigating an unreal urban space…
it is, unfortunately, also a testament to the fact that marginalized writers do not always necessarily produce perfect work; it’s riddled with an orientalism that ranges from “vague atmosphere” to these passages from the narrator’s visit to the Governor’s palace for an official party:
There they were joined by the Governor’s wife and daughter, ample ladies both, in long white dresses and small tilted hats, who draped themselves side by side at the end of the divan, slightly separate from Izmic and His Excellency, and looked to me suggestively like odalisques.
[…]
The longer I looked at the Governor the less he seemed like the benevolent figurehead of an idiosyncratic Mediterranean backwater, and the more like one of those spidery despots one reads about in old books of Oriental travel, crouching there at the heart of his web.
hello???????????
moments like this recur throughout the novel; while it’s clear that the narrator (and, I think, Morris herself) harbors a great deal of affection and sympathy for the people of Hav, it’s equally clear that her(/their) attitude towards them is fundamentally not that different from the various early twentieth-century visitors the novel records: a traveler from the imperial core looking to have an “authentic” experience of something exotic and strange, to be changed by the encounter with the Other (to, as bell hooks puts it, eat the Other). the prose is beautiful; the glimpse of alternate history is fascinating; I love the way Morris interweaves (fictional) history, (fictional) travelogue, (fictional) literary and historical allusions, and more; and the end (like, the final few sentences) is incredible. I enjoyed the reading experience, on the whole, but it’s marred by this.
it also — wildly unexpectedly — is a perfect synthesis of the Celticist and Orientalist strands in fantasy, being as it is a travelogue through a fictional “Oriental” city, but one whose oldest inhabitants — the cave-dwelling “Kretevs” whom the novel consistently refers to as “troglodytes” or “troglodytic” — are widely understood to be descended from the Galatians. in her encounters with them — and as an undercurrent throughout her exploration of Hav — the narrator is constantly searching for (and at times seems to find) confirmation of this (as it were) Celtic connection, in language, in music, in ~temperament~…. this was totally unexpected, but it does mean this goes on the shortlist of things I want to teach someday.
there’s a sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, which explores post-9/11 Hav, apparently, under the rule of “fundamentalists”, which sounds like it will probably be too much, either too uncomfortably close to the trajectory of Turkish history over the last twenty years or too much a neo-Orientalist stereotype. I don’t know that I’m going to read it.
moods: hopeful, lighthearted, mysterious, reflective