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Hav gives us Jan Morris. The city it describes is a magical place, but behind its arcane splendours are darker implications. The traditional Roof Race is peculiarly exciting, the waterfront is picturesque, the wistful call of a trumpeter from a distant rampart is evocative, and every street corner is haunted by memories of illustrious visitors - Freud, Diaghilev, Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia and countless others. But Morris's original visit to this prodigy, as recorded in Last Letters from Hav (1985), the first part of this book, ends in flight when an unidentified enemy ravages the place.
When she returns some twenty years later, to write the second part of the book, she discovers a city-state that has rebuilt itself, transformed by new energies and now dominated by a totemic tower 2000 feet tall. But as the old Hav was in many ways an allegory of the last century, so the city in its new incarnation offers no less elusive hints, echoes and portents of our twenty-first century world.
