Books like Hav

There are two works here: Last Letters from Hav, first published in 1985, followed by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel published twenty years later. I will speak of them separately.LAST LETTERS FROM HAV:They say that Hav is not real, that there is no city, no country named Hav. True, travel agents have been asked and ingloriously failed to get folks there. And the author's descriptions and such maps as she provides are, well, wanting. It is close by Montenegro, we know that for sure, but we can't say, precisely, what it abuts. There are sea routes to Greece, train services to Moscow. Yet, you won't find it on a map. Google, Siri, Alexa - they can all tell you who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp, but they're stumped, it seems, on where Hav sits. But Pliny was there. The First Crusaders too. Much later, Chopin came with George Sand and lived, as they say, in the Armenian way. James Joyce, instead, hung with other writers. Richard Burton, the explorer, went entirely Arab. Freud studied eel testes, this before he developed the castration complex. It was there that Rimsky-Korsakov wrote Scheherazade. Hitler's quick visit - he never left his touring car - is thought to be apocryphal. The minarets might make you think of Istanbul, but there are clearly Western influences, and Asian, too. It is a place where every religion seems to dominate, yet Hav is not religious, they say.Too much, you say, to believe. As if Hav is some invented microcosm of history, geography, biography. The author, herself, called Hav a jumble and a hazy allegory. Aren't all allegories hazy, I ask.A repository, I'd call it. As I am. They say that Hav is not real. They say that . . . but I don't believe that. Because there was this:Tramp steamers of a kind still come, and perhaps bring poets sometime.The tramp steamers are vague of distinction and improbable of cargo. I know that's true. And if, indeed, tramp steamers come, then there is a good chance a friend will be there, high on the mast, a lookout. If he does not, perhaps, bring a poem, he will, instead, bring his prayer. And that is real enough for me.HAV OF THE MYRMIDONS:Jan Morris, modestly claiming no prescience, wrote that the brooding sense of foreboding - (in her Last Letters from Hav) - erupted into catastrophe on September 11, 2001. Okay, maybe not so modestly. Last Letters does have a kind of cataclysmic ending. Hazy, though. And so, a sequel. (Which, by the way, didn't Airplane II, Caddyshack II and Dumb and Dumber to teach us anything?)Hav of the Myrmidons moves us into Dystopia. Morris misses the old ways, even imagined ones. She paints a bleak picture, which of course is not unusual in dystopian art. The (to my eyes) architecturally beautiful House of the Chinese Master of the first book is destroyed, replaced by The Myrmidonic Tower of the second book. The Tower- TOWER - is monolithic, very high, with a giant M on top, maybe for Myrmidon, maybe for Monsanto, Morris says. Regardless, it is a gaudy symbol for both power and plasticity. And what of the new Hav, really?The facts are . . . that there are no facts. Facts are factotum in the new Hav. Facts are faxes. Faxes are facts. Fair blows the fact on summer eve, and fierce the mountains fart. . . . There's a lot to be said for the Republic. It's certainly better than what came before. You may question the taste, but you can't deny the speed and efficiency of the recovery. Hav is certainly richer than it was before, and much better ordered. . . . What we object to is this: that it's all based upon lies.Some of you will no doubt say that Morris, in 2006, had not lost any of her prescience.So, is Hav real, after all? I don't know. I thought it was but now I'm not so sure. No tramp steamers come to port in the second act, no Gaviero with a better view.