He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?... It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell...In Companions of the Day and Night (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier Black Marsden - chiefly Clive Goodrich, the editor of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harriss fiction.
In this 1967 novel Wilson Harris explores the spiritual and psychic realities beyond the mundane facts of relationships, boldly constructing his story on the basis of fragments.When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed diary - or log book, as Susan Forrestal called it. She had suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after three operations, left her almost blind. Abandoned by her lover, who disappeared without a trace, she eventually married a kind and solicitous husband; nevertheless her lover continued to haunt her in such a way that his presence had an almost living reality.I admire Wilson Harriss novels greatly; he is one of the very few living novelists whose works are too brief for my tastes. Anthony Burgess
What [Wilson] Harris is doing is to extend the boundaries of our very conception of fiction. Robert Nye. First published in 1982, The Angel at the Gate is offered to readers as Wilson Harriss analysis and interpretation of the automatic writing of Mary Stella Holiday: an assumed name for the secretary and patient of the late Father Joseph Marsden.Mary suffered from a physical and nervous malaise as The Angel at the Gate makes clear. Through Marsden - the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her automatic talents - that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for Stella (apart from Mary) in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of association in past and present fictional lives. (From Harriss introductory Note.)
Wilson Harriss tenth novel, first published in 1972, is set in Edinburgh but, like much of his subsequent work, bridges continents by its imaginative reach.Doctor Black Marsden, tramp, shaman, and conjurer, is an ambivalent Merlin-figure representing both the heros personal (and archetypal) shadow, and the creative, magus-like activity of the author himself. Michael Gilkes, Journal of Commonwealth Literature... my many visits to Scotland, and books I have read, have given me the sensation of a tone or inner vibrancy that may be due to the languages (English, Scottish, Gaelic) that are present in the subconscious imagination of sensitive Scots... [These] make for the cross-culturality (not mono-cultural) that came into play in Black Marsden. Wilson Harris, 2008
This epic masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris centenary.An exhilarating experience ... Genius.Jamaica KincaidI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the birthplace of an epic masterpiece. Wilson HarrisThe Guyana Quartetconsists of four incandescent novels: Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. It is a landmark of twentieth-century literature, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.The Guyanese William Blake . [Such] poetic intensity.Angela CarterOne of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.GuardianAmazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.ObserverPerhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean. Fred DAguiarAn extraordinary writer ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues. Pauline MelvilleStaggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.The Times