The Palace of the Peacock [Paperback]

Wilson Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1988 | Series: Faber Caribbean

A tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana. In this novel, first published in 1960, can be traced the poetic vision, the themes and the designs of Harris's subsequent work, which included "The Guyana Quartet".

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris's novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first of The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)). His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liege (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (May 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571193234
• ISBN-13: 978-0571193233
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,527,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliance, January 2, 2001

By 

"mflinchy" (Jacksonville, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Palace of the Peacock (Paperback)

Wilson Harris produces, in the most poetic prose, the images, traditions, and myths of the the Carribean. Although most readers will find his writing too strange to follow, those people willing to submit to his style will find themselves torn from the restrictive world of realism. Palace of the Peacock depicts the journey of Donne's crew as they pursue both indigenous laborers and the creation of the universe. The characters are simultaneously dead and alive, dreaming and awake, as they shed the burden of mere physical existence. Philosophically and stylistically, Harris is unique and intriguing. I recommend Palace highly; unfortunately, his other novels are out of print.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic Fiction for the Non-literal Minded, May 4, 2008

By 

Doug - Haydn Fan (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Palace of the Peacock (Paperback)

Wilson Harris, born in 1921 in what was then British Guiana and is now Guyana, is one of the most unflinchingly poetic British novelists of the twentieth century. Generally lumped in with such English writers from the Caribbean as Naipaul, these "West Indian Novelists" are in actuality quite diverse in style and artistry. Where Naipaul is world famous, Harris is now almost totally forgotten, and out of print. Harris, a decidely challenging read, thus today is now inaccessible for most readers in both fact and fiction! For all the variety of modern fiction, there remain certain pragmatic lines in the sand, lines no writer wishing to attain even a fleeting popularity dare cross. This explains the disappearance of so gifted a writer as Harris. Readers must it appears sooner or later need the security blankets of the concrete; what Harris spells out in an essay as "the selection of items, manners, uniform conversation, historical situations, etc., all lending themselves to build and present an individual span of life which yields self-conscious and fashionable judgements, self-conscious and fashionable moralities." Absent these literary crutches, readers shun his works, and move on to authors more forgiving, but less fundamentally exciting.

Harris seeks and explores the twin themes of disorientation and human unity through language, highly personal language neither scientific nor founded, as so much of modern writing is, on the journalistic, but rather language teeming with brilliant metaphors and wide-arching similes tracking the most gyrating perspectives. Such writing deliberately confuses, and apparently is anathema for most readers; its lack of direction turns off even the young, bright demanding minds too filled these days with the narrow-mindedness of careerism. Even readers who might be willing to follow fantasy or 'soft' philosophy, such as they find in such writers as Hessse, reject a writer like Harris as confusing, pointless, obscure.

The Palace of the Peacock, first published in 1960, was the author's first novel; he didn't finish it until he was nearly forty, a very late age for a novelist to take up his craft. It calls to mind a series of novels, now seen as radical or non-mainstream, written during the forties and fifties; most prominent among these works is the fiction of John Hawkes. Dense and dreamlike, the most extreme examples of this fiction seldom offer very much in the way of a traditional narrative.

Describing an exploration upriver, Palace of the Peacock sometimes reminds of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yet Harris works from such a decidely multiple vision as to refute much of the narrative point of view Conrad worked so assiduously to maintain in his story. The unfolding tragedy here takes on a marked difference, for Harris is a native writer, and he visualizes a complex and perplexing human unity where Europeans discover only otherness and disintegration. Harris continually denies any distinct one voice or certainty, demanding his reader confront this perplexing interplay with the same degree of intensity as do his characters and their evasive narrator.

The novel consists of four books, each set off by a short quotation from a major poet - Yeats, Donne, and two by Hopkins. The opening book, "Horseman, Pass By" sets the basic plot in motion, a boat is journeying up the river through the Guyanese rain forest. The second book, "The Mission of Mariella" finds the Armeridian village of Mariella deserted, and the crew, finding an old native woman, enlists her forceably as guide. In the novel's longest book, "The Second Death", the men travel further and further upstream looking for the missing villagers. After a series of deaths and further confusion the novel evolves into a vast bewildering dream, "Paling of Ancestors".

Harris invites readers into a different reading process, one demanding new sensibilities and asking that old habits be jettisoned. His works both encapsule the colonial experience while at the same time expanding it's inherent limitations until it is triumphantly overcome. It is not surprising his books are generally unavailable - few readers respond to his challenges or his open-ended invitation. Those who do will be amply rewarded.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Caribbean "Heart Of Darkness", April 25, 2003

By 

Geoffrey Philp (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Palace of the Peacock (Paperback)

Wilson Harris' epic charts the history of the Caribbean through the metaphor of Donne's crew as they travel into a West Indian "heart of darkness."