Andrew Lycett
The Meaning of Nowhere
If I did not know better, I might have thought Jan Morris had been watching too many episodes of The Prisoner. Why else, after announcing her intention to stop writing books, has she again picked up her pen, returned to Hav, the fictional city-state she lovingly created twenty-one years ago, and refashioned it as a malign dystopia?
Portmeirion, the Welsh village where Patrick McGoohan’s television series was filmed, is situated not far from Morris’s fastness at Llanystumdwy. The Prisoner used Clough Williams-Ellis’s pastiche architecture as the backdrop for the sinister machinations of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy obscurely related to British intelligence.
Something similar has become of Hav. When Morris last reported from there in Last Letters from Hav (1985), it was a quaint destination, lost in a time-warp somewhere between Trieste, Salonika and Beirut. Its sleepy Levantine confusion was made bearable by the richness of its customs and history, which drew
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers