Hav

July 18, 2011
Taken for the real thing on its first publication in 1985, this faux-travel memoir prompted fruitless calls to confused travel agents. It's no wonder: Morris's imagination is a marvel, her spectral country fully realized and fascinating. Hav, an eastern Mediterranean peninsula, rises believably in the mind, with its city skyline of onion domes, minarets, and one incongruous pagoda along with its glorious and complex history. Hav's past is ingeniously, believably intertwined with real events; its present is realistically faded and isolated, adding to the eerie feeling one gets of spying on a lost world. While this sense of wonder is not quite enough to sustain interest in the absence of any plot, the book picks up toward the second half (which was added 20 years after the first) when a more sinister, dystopian tone takes over. After a mysterious, catastrophic "Intervention," a new society led by an obscure secret order assumes control, and Hav becomes a morally compromised hub of international wealth and influence. This section is more clearly a commentary, an "analogy" as Morris (Conundrum) calls it, but both volumes are thought provoking and, in some ways at least, live up to Morris's description of Hav as "a little compendium of the world's experience."