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.

Literary Review

Jun 2006

Categories

Andrew Lycett

The Old Man & the Signorina

No More Respected and More Read than Johnson

Dreaming of Gondar

A Case of Identity

Upwards from Everest

The Great Globe Itself

Day of the Journalist

Andrew Lycett Talks To Jan Morris

Half The World Away

Following The Pharohs

Love Behind A Mask

1968 And All That

Charm, Guile and Gab

Camouflage Expert

Gertrude Stein’s Bra

Murder Most Fouled-Up

For the Sake of Dahoum

The Adventure of the Concealed Manuscript

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Making A Killing

Inspector Bucket Calls

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

Who’s Listening In?

‘Drink Up, Dear’

Occult Finish