The Guyana Quartet

The Guyana Quartet #1-4

by Wilson Harris

Everyman Masters, sixty-five, begins a spiritual journey through the mysterious Caribbean carnival of masks.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Classics, Literature, 20th Century, Contemporary

463 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing quartet of novels, not as difficult to read as I'd been led to expect by some of the reviews. There are passages of poetic lyricism (do I even know what I'm talking about? Probably not) that can be tricky to parse but I tried not to understand every phrase, just get the overall impression.
Three of the novels concern themselves with characters who may or may not be already dead. It's left a little ambivalent.

[Feliks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Embarked on this title because of the recommendation Anthony Burgess gave it as part of his '99 best novels' treatise.

Unfortunately I can't say I'm enjoying it. I am sure it would be of strong technical interest to anyone keen on novelistic craft, in that it shows a dazzling and ambitious way to write a novel. Many pages and sections of the prose do read more like poetry. And it is a great work of South American literature; authentic and true and strong.

But in practical terms, it is an incomprehensible jumble. It so thoroughly abandons traditional writing guidelines that all the imagery and fireworks become a hindrance.

You simply can't find coherent sense of whats going on. Harris deliberately severs his narration from all the mechanics that allow readers to follow along. When there is dialog you often can't tell who is speaking to whom; when there is action you can't determine who is performing the action. Emotions and thoughts seem to hang disembodied in the air; the subjects or objects to which they might be associated are constantly shuffled like cards.

The first of the four novellas has so far been the best: there is at least some shred of a story. The key technical feat Harris displays was treating the reader to a protagonist describing himself from different angles, as in a cubist painting.

This goes even further than another novel on Burgess' list, John Updike's 'The Coup' where the narrator flips back'n'forth from 3rd- person to 1st-person POV from chapter to chapter. Harris trumps that, switching POV from one sentence to the next. Truly daring and psychedelic.

The story is nominally about a journey of a group of men down a branch of the Amazon river; but you can hardly tell. Harris doesn't expend effort to detail the trip except from within the dream-like and kaleidoscope-seeming arrangements of the men's various inner mental states.

Parts #2 and #3 of the book --heck, I can't say what is even occurring. I *wish* there was a river journey. Instead, its just a fuzzy, gauzy mess of 1-2 characters wandering about on vacant savannah. Its as if words are just sprayed onto the page at random. Absolute gibberish which quickly becomes a chore to complete.

I'm glad I chose this book --how many truly South American novels are there?--but I will be glad when its over.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

The four books that make up this inter-related/relating resonating ecosystem of dream language and philosophy is among the few works that I know that start to transcend what a book or novel is. It is right in there with Finnegans Wake, it has its own life and seems to transmogrify in parallel with the life of the reader and the reader's dreams and imagination.

The quartet is not for most people. It is for those who have perhaps had experiences in the shocks and revelations of cross-culturality/cross-cultural encounters, or for those who have worked long and hard to collect, ponder and fathom their own dream scapes and dream lives in tandem with the life of the day. Harris weaves these and other concerns, not least of which would be a quantum indeterminant way of writing/talking about what one sees, to say what one knows without killing it with categories, conceptuality, and conventions of grammar, thought and language, yet all the while employing those suspect tools of expression, commuication and dare I say, art.

There is no one thinking, writing, imagining things at even close to the level that Wilson Harris has been doing consistently for half of a century. He simply cannot be passed up by anyone with a penchant for deep psychic, cultural, mythic and deep nature exploration as it has all come together in the El Doradan forest frame of Guyana.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Guyana Quartet consists of four novellas first published in the early 1960s, each with different characters but the same regional setting, atmosphere, and themes. Harris writes what I would genuinely consider purple prose, which I mean as a compliment. While it took a little getting used to, once I got into the rhythm I found it a pleasure to read:

The heavens changed again, and grew lighter into a flowering incipient reflection that one sees sometimes on a very dark night in the direction of Georgetown, where the night-lights of Demerera lie, as one wanders over the savannahs, miles and miles away from nowhere. The distance had blossomed into a spectacle far greater than this, however, or any that one could dream of, a kind of crimson whiteness and spirit-fire and blush. This changed once again quickly, pursuing a secret rule, and turning into rolling features of molasses, and into faint shivering cracks and lightnings followed by thunder and a reverberating breathless clap. There was a moment's hush and stillness and one could hear a beetle walking on the ground. Then the far track of lightnings came closer, without warning, and flew into one's eye, forked and veined and vicious, flashing closer still, blindingly, again and again, and unrolling into a webbed hand and foot like a crumpled flying napkin and sheet, on which the sacred embryonic beasts of the sky crouched. The table of creation began to dislodge itself and to fall with the greatest crash.

The main characters are dead men who haven't realised that they're dead yet. There is a wide-ranging collapse of boundaries throughout the four narratives, between life and death; past and present; dreams and memories; humans and the environment. Ethnicities aren't clearly distinguished either, nor do they appear a direct source of power, which is interesting. The gender binary is quite strongly upheld, though, and women appear much more adept at survival than men. Death pervasively haunts this book, to the point that the first novella could be about a group of ghosts. I half-assumed that it was. Sequences of events are muddled and seem cyclical. The fourth and final novella appears initially to have a more prosaic and grounded protagonist, but his narrative is also dragged into the mysteriously unclear boundaries between life and death. Indeed, it's striking to end the quartet on such a note, letting an ostensibly quite different character reckon with this strange milieu.

Throughout The Guyana Quartet it is difficult to keep track of what order events occur in, whether the protagonists are actually alive, and whether any given incident is dreamed, imagined, or actually occurring. This atmosphere of confusion is curiously fascinating and distinctive. I found Harris' writing different to any other writer I can readily think of. I particularly appreciated his voluptuous depiction of rivers, swamps, coastlines, and jungles, as well as the weather, foliage, insects, birds, and beasts to be found there. The reader is given the impression that the ecosystems create, or at least catalyse, the psychological struggles experienced by seemingly undead protagonists. I didn't know anything about Guyana before reading these novellas, but now am at least aware of where to find it on a map. I enjoyed exploring the place via these densely observed, vividly written, and beguiling novellas.

[Doug Frizzle · Rating 4 out of 5]

As mentioned in a previous review, this is a difficult book but I found it most rewarding, though I have read a number of articles about Guyana, both fiction and nonfiction before.
The flow of the book is just as foreign as the rivers and the geography and the history of the people.

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything is in here. The cosmos. I love Magda and Cristo the most.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the last book of the Guyana Quartet, The Secret Ladder, there is a passage that encapsulates the entire sequence of novellas: "It was a landscape of comic deception, perhaps, but also of terror. The original unity had been broken and time had become the needle and fabric knitting the catchment of the past as well as preparing a gulf in the heart of the present and future."

I have never encountered anything that so closely represents the consistent logic of dreaming than these four novellas. Indeed, the first three novels begin with characters dreaming and the last concludes with a descent into dreaming. Altogether they feel like the process of waking up from a surreal dreamscape, with each novel becoming less dream-like until the last one is the most "realist" with a boat named after the first novel, Palace of the Peacock.

At its most dreamlike characters move in and out of each other, time is unbounded, death and life are intermixed, people slip sideways into parallel states of reality, landscapes are knit together. Wilson Harris writes as if he is a post-colonial Joseph Conrad following the narrative logic of David Lynch's most coherently incoherent films.

I can see why Dionne Brand has lauded these books, especially the first one, and am glad I finally got a chance to read them.

[Yvonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to add another 1/2 star because the writing is absolute perfection and truly takes the reader to a different plane. But the shear complexity left me so deeply challenged at times to keep the narrative “straight”. Definitely not to be tackled at the end of a long day, these are stories one must be prepared to work at, to re read, to sit aside and ponder because they are quite beautiful, spiritual even. Perhaps a second or third read would result in at least another star.

[V Hine · Rating 3 out of 5]

In places I really loved the sense of immersion in a complex, overwhelming, layered environment; but these sections were interspersed with parts where the writing seemed forced or too try-hard (like doubling up on the nouns to create a sense of duality, which was clever until it was so frequent and over-engineered that it dragged you out of the narrative) or was so tortuous that the narrative voice needed to clarify, e.g. "he (Donne)". A frustrating read.

[Liz Mayhew · Rating 4 out of 5]

3, 4, 4, 4.5
Magnificent.

[Keith Partyka · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have DNF'd.

[Hans Wiegand · Rating 3 out of 5]

A jungle of tales, characters, visions, metaphors, and what more. Intriguing but not to be read when confused…

[Deandra K.]

I couldn't make it. I'll try again later.

[Val · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guyana