Trieste and the meaning of nowhere Jan Morris Faber and Faber, 194pp, £16.99 ISBN 0571204430

I once had the pleasure of escorting Jan Morris's genial and candid book reviews into the pages of a newspaper. They came well-dressed, like VIPs at an airport. We never needed to check their papers; just waved them through to their reserved seat. I know her a little, is what I'm saying, and consider myself a fan. So I was taken aback to read, on the cover of her new book - a shimmering self-examination set in Trieste - that it is to be her last. She says so herself, on the penultimate page. "The books I have written are no more than smudged graffiti on a wall, and I shall write no more of them. Money? Enough to live on. Critics? To hell with 'em. Kindness is what matters, all along."

This is the signature Morris style: melancholy but breezy; dismissive yet not haughty; at once resolute and throwaway. I guess you either like it or you don't (I do). But . . . kindness? Where the hell did that sneak in? At a time when the world is ensnared by hot-headed abstractions (Capitalism! Fundamentalism! Globalisation! Freedom! Democracy! Infinite Justice!), it's more than salutary to see someone sticking up for such a fragile plant. Nor is this a whimsical flourish. It follows an emphatic sermon on the subject which amounts to little less than a credo.

"There are people everywhere," Morris writes, "who form a Fourth World, a diaspora of their own. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinistic. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if only they knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste."

Golly. It is always a shock when someone writes from the heart. And Trieste, it turns out, is well cast as the standard-bearer for such concerns, and a good place to "sniff the imperial breezes". An unequivocal hater of nationalisms, Morris loves the city's good-natured and cosmopolitan flavour. Half-Austrian, half-Italian and (if we can stretch the arithmetic) half-Slovenian, Trieste comes spiced with the mercantile know-how of Greeks and Jews, and splashed with the pathos of faded glory. It enjoyed its heyday as the thrumming port of the Hapsburg empire but, when repossessed by Italy in 1919, it found itself neither needed nor wanted (Italy had enough ports). Now, in Morris's incorrigibly subjective portrait, Trieste emerges as an allegorical city of vivid ghosts and ageing pageantry, a city of once ardent dreams and sober regrets frozen in wistfulness, a harbour of post-imperial tristesse where the buildings seem deserted, flags hang listlessly from their poles, trams wait for passengers who never come and "a solitary man sits hunched and motionless over a float that never bobs". It is a city built for introspection, for brief angelic visitations, and Morris uses it as a Proustian prop, letting memories of her own tangled life drift to the placid surface. And it is gorgeously written: trembling with hallucinatory details and cameos from Trieste's past. This is no tourist slog past the sights: the book feels as if it had been composed at the cool, skin-prickling lucidity of dawn.

In capturing the resonance of Trieste's genteel dignity - she likens it to an impoverished millionaire, or a retired specialist pottering around the house - Morris is also standing up for something even less fashionable than imperial nostalgia: the bourgeoisie. She is keen on lost causes: nothing brings a tear to her eye like a stray cat. But the bourgeoisie - the easy butt of so many right-on jokes and manifestos - struggles to find eloquent cultural sponsors. Morris casually insists that it is the bourgeoisie who hold "the balance of civilisation everywhere . . . tempering the arrogance of aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses". She declines to see "cultivated businessmen" as a contradiction in terms.

A tear for lost empires . . . a moment's silence for the genius of bourgeois values: these will strike some readers as queasily conventional sentiments. That Morris is probably the least conventional of all our major writers makes them seem hard-won. The book begins with a "necessary explanation" reminding us that Jan used to be James Morris until she "completed a change of sexual role in 1972". How conventional is that? The sex-change described (compellingly) in Conundrum has often cried out for a sequel. What - we can't help wondering in our more voyeuristic moments - is life as a woman like, after life as a man? At a time of voluminous gender tension, this is essential information, and Jan Morris is, so far as I know, the only writer equipped to tell us.

This book is probably as close as we will get. Dreamy, glancing, allusive, it is a thoroughly captivating elegy for herself, himself, Trieste and the modern world. Morris is as alert to the poetry of polished brass and harbour dues as she is to the resonance of Verdi operas, serious architecture and landscape. The hills above her city are "harsh, grey, fox-haunted and raven-flown", and the sky is sometimes ecstatically blue, sometimes swollen with rain: "drip, drop, drip, drop, like the sad ticking of time". The book is soaked in melancholy, but is not at all mawkish, because Morris cannot for long rein in her irrepressible, to-hell-with-it cheerfulness.

I believe her when she says that this is it: the end. And it is not as if we can grumble. The groaning list of "other books" reveals that Morris has hardly been lazy: from the upper slopes of Everest to the docks of Manhattan, she has been restless, questing and generous in her interests, and with her gifts. Around 45 books (including such classics as the riveting Pax Britannica trilogy and Venice): it looks like a life well spent to me. And they are all enlivened with her (and his) highly particular, unaffected, garrulous and expressive rhetoric. Turn any page and you inhale something exceptional, something lit up by relish. I hope that this turns out not to be her final work; and no one could begrudge her second thoughts. When you have changed your sex, you are surely entitled to change your mind.

Robert Winder writes monthly for the New Statesman

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