True Places: Jan Morris’ Hav
In 1984, writer Jan Morris spent several months in Hav, an idiosyncratic city in the Eastern Mediterranean. She left it just ahead of a violent insurrection and collected her letters describing the city into a book, Last Letters From Hav. Twenty years later, she returned to Hav to document what had changed, in a piece called Hav of the Myrmidons. Both were collected together in one volume, called simply Hav.
Hav, of course, doesn’t really exist. It’s not on any map of this world; true places (to quote Melville) never are.
Morris created Hav, situating it in a specific place and imagining a history for it which she then proceeded to uncover as a tourist. Morris is an experienced travel writer and she brings Hav alive, its foods and dress and sights, its flora and fauna and geology. She has a fine eye for detail and a strong prose style, conveying much in a brief space. She’s also reflective, contemplating on the things she sees and her own perception of these things: one can certainly argue that that’s what the book’s about: What she knows of Hav, what she learns and how, and what will always remain mysterious.
The first book, Last Letters, takes the form of six letters written over as many months. We meet some of the people of Hav, learn about the odd mix of cultures that made the place what it is, and see many of its unusual sights and traditions. But we also see strange things happening, things that the natives gloss over, but which disconcert Morris. She penetrates deeply into the nature of the city, finally encountering a surprising secret society; and then she leaves, just moments before some kind of upheaval strikes the city. What’s happening? Who’s behind it? Much is left ambiguous, though there are hints.
Every so often, I come across a book so idiosyncratic I have to write about it just to work out what it is I’ve read. A book strange and powerful, but whose power is difficult to locate or specify. Sometimes it’s hard even to be sure whether the book can be called ‘good’ in any meaningful way. By writing about it, I can get some thoughts in order, and see where they lead. And as such, I want to take a look here at Olga Slavnikova’s 2017.
V.E. Schwab had written a number of YA novels when, in 2013, Tor published her book Vicious. Billed by some as a super-hero story, it had elements of that genre while also, to some extent, questioning its assumptions. Reading it, I found that the book seemed interested in questions of morality, heroism, and villainy, but that the super-hero aspects were so attenuated I doubt it would have occurred to me to consider it as a super-hero story without the claims of the book jacket. Its handling of ideas of heroism felt like a reiteration of themes comics (Marvel, DC, and independent) have been interrogating relentlessly (if not neurotically) for at least thirty years. In some ways, it’s best to simply ignore the ‘super-hero’ tag. If you do, you’re left with a well-paced and sharply-structured novel. And on its own terms, it’s an enjoyable tale.
Leaving the dark brick stairwells of the Lucien L’Allier métro last Sunday morning at 10, we found the rain was holding off: something not to be expected. Forecasts called for meteorological chaos in Montréal over the following days. Up to 24 degrees celsius, down to 2, thunderstorms, snow. But that was in the future. For the moment, Grace and I were looking for books to hold us through those unsettled days and more.
A little while ago, I stumbled on a book that seemed especially worth writing about here: The City, by Stella Gemmell. It’s Gemmell’s first solo novel; she also completed Troy: Fall of Kings, the last book by her late husband, David. David Gemmell was a widely-known heroic fantasy writer — those unfamiliar with his work can see 
Two years ago, veteran author Mary Gentle’s most recent novel The Black Opera was published to mixed reviews. Some liked the book’s mix of alternate-history fantasy and comic-opera theatricality — as the sub-title has it, “a novel of Opera, Volcanoes, and the Mind of God.” Others, 
Somewhere in Europe, probably around the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century, someone put together a book of tales. Likely this someone was a cleric who wanted to compile a manual to use in sermons and preaching. The texts were written in Latin and featured stories of all sorts: romances, travellers’ tales, fragments of Pliny and Herodotus and Aesop. A number were brief and didactic, if not prosaic, describing some uninteresting event or propounding a riddle a nearby wise man quickly answered with too pat an explanation — but others of the tales were filled with miracles and adventure and magic, with angels and saints and knights and dragons. Each was given a detailed moral, with every incident and character shown to have allegorical significance. Whether because it boasted wonder-stories, because it made those wonder-stories Christian parables, or both, the book quickly became immensely popular. This being well before the age of print, manuscripts proliferated, gaining and losing stories along the way.
Amos Tutuola was born in Nigeria in 1920 to a Christian family. With six years of formal schooling, he served as a coppersmith with the Lagos-based arm of the Royal Air Force in World War Two, then worked at a number of of odd jobs. As he tells it, a government magazine he happened to read, with “very lovely portraits of the gods,” advertised books based on Yoruba legends. Tutuola remembered being praised as a storyteller in school and decided there was no reason he shouldn’t turn his hand to writing similar books. So he did. He completed his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, in only a few days.
With 
It seems like one of those creative pairings that could only happen in comics. Odd, then, that it was originally planned to be a film.