In his tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana, first published in 1960, Wilson Harris revealed the unique poetic vision and laid out the themes and designs, not only of his famous work, The Guyana Quartet, but of all his future work. The Palace of the Peacock displays that vision in all its hallucinatory vividness, given additional impact by its rejection of the conventions of the twentieth-century novel and the uncompromising energy of its use of language in its response to character and landscape. The compelling adventure story of the narrative is para... continue
The whole purpose of magic is the fulfilment and intensification of desire, claims the ventriloquist-narrator as he tells his stories of love and catastrophe. The novel is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture and of the rebellious nature of love.