A travel writer arrives at a tiny, once thriving Levantine city-state on the shores of the Mediterranean. She meets the people, sees the sights, evokes past and present through delicate description and historical anecdote, not always reliable, but even the stories are indicative of some aspect of the personality of the place. It is rich with culture and full of history, and yet it is an odd, elusive place, all surface, all smiles, hard to pin down, hard to truly understand. She will never understand the place. Her account is occasionally interrupted by odd little hints of things beneath the surface. They never coalesce into any real threat or danger or suspense, until the final pages, when with discreet and refined bewilderment she is ushered to the border, building to the incredible, subtle crescendo of the final line of Letters To Hav.

Hav, of course, is fictional, an invention by travel writer Jan Morris, who is also a character in this book. It is a 'hazy allegory,' but its true allegory is the difficulty of understanding a place. In Hav of The Myrmidons she returns, briefly, and discovers it transformed. It is more surface, louder, brighter, richer. And though she clearly prefers to withhold judgement and let people's own words speak for them, she cannot hide her frustration and even her anger that the changes have made the place even more hidden and ambiguous and secret.

A brilliant book, beautifully written, an astonishing piece of worldbuilding that hauntingly evokes modern dilemmas and confusions as much as it evokes a place.