The Times Literary Supplement once described Jan Morris as a motorised scholar-gypsy. She has also been called the Flaubert of the jet age.
It's tempting to compress larger-than-life characters into such neat phrases, and there is truth in both descriptions, but the life and substantial literary output of Jan Morris deserve more. In Paul Clements's lively book - not a biography, but the first major study of this renowned author - they are given comprehensive coverage, and she emerges as a passionate, driven character, ever open to new experience, and literally full of the joys of life.
Morris is best known as a travel writer, and her books on Venice, Oxford and Spain continue to sell well after 30 years. It was she who effectively set the tone for much of today's popular travelogue literature, with its quirkiness, atmosphere, cultural curiosity and preference for evocation over actual description.
Yet Morris is also a journalist, historian, biographer and novelist. For example, her Pax Britannica trilogy, an account of the British Empire, was a huge popular success. As Clements points out, while it was not well received by academic historians, it unquestionably struck a chord with a whole generation of people in Britain.
Other readers will recall Morris's Conundrum, which told the story of how former soldier and journalist James Morris, married, with four children, gradually and irrevocably became Jan Morris. Published in 1972, when transsexualism was not at all as fashionable as it is today, Conundrum drew huge attention and a very mixed reaction, some of it intensely cruel.
Paul Clements summarises these reactions efficiently and deals with the question of how the sex change affected Morris's subsequent writing (quite badly, many think). He points out one incontrovertible fact, that the books written after 1972 never won the international acclaim (or sales) garnered by the classic Morris books on Venice, Spain and Oxford.
The atmospheric and passionate The Matter of Wales, however, became one of Morris's best-selling books, and her long love affair with Wales is well documented. Typically, she loves the notion of the country (only 200 miles from London) having its own language, its "unappeasable patriots", its apparent sense of grievance and suspicion about England, and the conflict between "the almost mystical determination of a small, poor, rugged country and the brute strengths of its magnificent neighbour".
Sounds familiar.
To summarise and analyse the voluminous output of a writer like Morris is far from easy. Paul Clements's background as a news journalist (with BBC Northern Ireland) has clearly served him well, for his book is a first-class overview, comprehensive, informed and thoughtful.
Not all those who read Morris will be as keen as Clements on her style, though he admits it is often florid and overwrought. Nevertheless, he delights in her various verbal quirks. When he details these mannerisms in the outpouring of love ("bordering on infatuation") for Wales revealed in The Matter of Wales, Clements notes, in a remark which could serve as a summary for all Morris's work: "When these are added to her qualities of vigorous intelligence, intellectual stimulation and impassioned prose, the irrepressible Welsh spirit that is Jan Morris shines like a sparkling beacon".
Brendan Glacken is an Irish Times staff journalist
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