Palace of the Peacock

The Guyana Quartet #1

by Wilson Harris

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".

Genres: Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, Africa, Adventure

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hardly can find an author more enigmatic than Wilson Harris… Every book of his is a cryptic spiritual journey…

We stood on the frontiers of the known world, and on the selfsame threshold of the unknown.

To die, to sleep, to dream… All the characters of the novel are dead, and they sleep, and they are dreaming… And even if they wake up they just wake up into another dream:

A dog rose and stood over me. A horse it was in the uncertain grey light, half-wolf, half-donkey, monstrous, disconsolate; neighing and barking in one breath, its terrible half-hooves raised over me to trample its premature rider. I grew conscious of its closeness as a shadow and as death. I made a frightful gesture to mount, and it shrank a little into half-woman, half-log greying into the dawn. Its teeth shone like a misty rag, and I raised my hand to cajole and stroke its ageing, soulful face. I sat bolt upright in my hammock, shouting aloud that the devil himself must fondle and mount this muse of hell and this hag, sinking back instantly, a dead man in his bed come to an involuntary climax. The grey wet dream of dawn had restored to me Mariella’s terrible stripes and anguish of soul. The vaguest fire and warmth came like a bullet, flooding me, over aeons of time it seemed, with penitence and sorrow.

The crew of characters is travelling upriver – up some turbulent tropical Styx – to the uncertain and vague destination… And even if some of them die again they just die into another sleep.
And on the seventh day of creation they arrive…

It was the seventh day from Mariella. And the creation of the windows of the universe was finished.

We all – dead or alive – are just the infinitesimal fragments of the cosmic anima.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do wonder why Wilson Harris is not better known; he has been writing for over 50 years and was knighted in the 2010 honours list (that didn’t make the popular news I seem to recall). He was originally a surveyor in Guyana and his early work is very much set in the Guyanese/South American jungle. There are strong links to Hegel and Heidegger. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis model is present throughout the novel and in the way the plot is played out. Harris also rejects conventional plot, settings and particularly realism which he equates with colonialism.

In Palace of the Peacock Donne and his crew journey by boat into the interior and the rain forest, in a voyage which parallels the creation story and takes place over seven days. Donne embodies creation and destruction and using the name of the metaphysical poet was deliberate according to Harris. There are strong links with the search for El Dorado and also with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but whilst Conrad’s Marlow embodies alienation and breakdown; Harris’s characters progress to restoration and repossession via death and the destructive cycle. I must admit I haven’t as yet thought through the contrast between Conrad’s Marlow (Christopher) and Harris’s Donne (John). The inheritance of colonialism and slavery are transformed with an alternative renewal which has everything to do with the spirit of the land and the music at the end of the book that comes with the second death of the crew. Don’t expect an easy read, but the whole story flows linguistically like the river it describes with hidden rapids and magnificent waterfalls. Harris himself says the images are convertible and speaks about the mixed metaphysic of the crew. The images are complex but with thought and careful reading the story is a magical one.

[Mir · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vision and idea mingled into a sensitive carnival that turned the crew into a fearful herd where he clung with his eye of compassion to his precarious and dizzy vertical hold and perched on the stream of the cliff. The light of space changed, impinging upon his eyeball and lid numerous grains of sounds and motion that were the suns and moons of all space and time. The fowls of the air danced and wheeled on invisible lines that stretched taut between the ages of light and snapped every now and then into lightning executions of dreaming men when each instant ghost repaired the wires again in the form of an inquisitive hanging eye and bird.

Do you like that? How you get along with this book will depend a lot on how you feel about this style of writing. Personally, I find it somewhat pleasant from a purely aesthetic point of view, but very difficult to follow the sense of it. I found it quite hard to figure out what was happening in this book, and especially to distinguish actual from allegorical descriptions.

A man -- I think never named, he's simply "I" -- comes to Guyana to see his tougher older brother, Donne the author quotes the poet Donne I tune the instrument here at the door/And what I must do then, think here before so presumably the name is symbolic of something whom he has not seen since youth. He has had in the past and has still dreams of Donne being shot dead. He meets Donne's servant/mistress/abuse victim Mariella, with whom he has a sexual encounter. She kills Donne and runs away. Donne and his brother gather a party to go after her-- What? You thought Donne had been killed? Yeah, it says that but clearly he is alive, he doesn't seem hurt at all. In that case why are they pursuing Mariella? Did she shoot and miss? I don't know. -- up the river by boat, to a Mission. Everyone is gone, an old woman says because of seasonal flooding but Donne thinks they fled because they heard he was coming and were afraid of him. Abducting the old woman and possibly raping her, or maybe that was imaginary, they continue their pursuit.

That's about it, in terms of action that I could parse. They boat for 7 (I think) days. Several of the men die, due to accidents or getting stabbed by one another for unclear reasons. They have conversations about their past, crimes and suffering and illegitimate children, some of which are true and some aren't. Eventually the remainder arrive at a cliff? Or at the Palace of the Peacock? Is it a real palace? I don't know. Are there peacocks in Guyana? What is the significance of the peacock? I don't know.

Oh, also for a long time in the middle our narrator I ceases to be mentioned and is replaced by omniscient narration, or by "we" but a we who knows a lot about what one another are thinking or not exactly thinking but experiencing in their minds. Which is along the lines of the first passage I quote only with more emotions and sex.

Lastly, people who complain that I use too many commas should read this and see how they like really few commas.

I found this interesting to try once but probably won't pick up this author again.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did I read this book, or did this book read me? I'm not trying to be snide, here, or precious, or cruel. I am in love with this book. I would like to be its girlfriend.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through sinister jungles and lurid daymares, we float up the river into a landscape forsaken by the living. Death is on one bank and Life on the other, but in the churning eddies that spin our souls skyward we know not which is which and paddle onward blindly. Is this the river Styx? Are we careening towards an inner Hell? Is this the fabled Heart of Darkness?

We are in the remote backwaters of colonial Guyana, where maps are cracks on withered faces and there reigns "a cannibal blind fear in oneself" (p. 52). The crew on this surreal vessel straddles the line between death and survival, dying a thousand deaths yet struggling on.

"their living names matched the names of a famous dead crew that had sunk in the rapids and been drowned to a man, leaving their names inscribed on Sorrow Hill which stood at the foot of the falls. But this in no way interfered with their lifelike appearance and spirit and energy" (p.26).

At scarcely 100 pages, this mindfuck novella should be read in one submersive sitting, instead of stretched into a string of bus rides and morning coffees. Perhaps it all comes together in a second reading. Maybe my ignorance of Guyanese culture is at fault. The book blurb pegs it as "a kaleidoscopic sequence of brilliant allusive fragments, and luminous mirages from Guyanese history, tradition, and myths of genealogy and discovery." Instead I sleepwalked into an inverse universe where the lights dazzled me and the script was beautiful but its meaning indecipherable. Partway through I slipped through to the other side of a haze of morphine and watched the shadows of power and fear and human fragility dance on the wall in front of me. Yes, I woke up shaking in a hospital bed, a highly controlled environment populated by ticking and beeping, the polar opposite of those uncharted nether regions. Yet the same uncertainty hangs in the air and disorientation is the only orientation. If I was upriver in Guyana I'd probably be dead by now. I don't know where I am but I'd recommend this place all the same.

[Mike E. Mancini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely a challenging, unconventional read for a lot of people. Time and reality are manipulated often and skillfully. Wonderful prose mostly, some overwrought metaphors maybe. I look forward to rereading Palace sooner than I thought.

[parzival elijah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The spiritual heart of darkness

[Heather Clitheroe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two parts peyote, one part novel.

[Julian Worker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what happens in this book or indeed where it happens.

Everything I write should be prefaced with 'I think'.

Donne is a plantation owner who requires some labour to help with his new rice planting, with his cattle, and everything else on his estate. However, the locals have gone elsewhere possibly due to drought and won't be back in time to aid Donne.

Therefore, Donne decides to go and find them and bring them back to help. He obtains a 'crew' for a boat and they head along the river to find the people. A series of misfortunes strike the people onboard and at least three of them die before what remains of the crew abandons the boat and proceeds on foot. At this point, the story goes from being a practical journey to becoming a spiritual search for the Palace of the Peacock.

At least that's what the story appears to be. The blurb indicates that the story is a modernist fever dream or a modern myth or a hallucinatory prose poem. Or perhaps an elegy to the victims of colonial conquest. Or a combination of all four?

[Marian · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like, 3.75... I struggled in the first half or so, but the ending was spectacular. More thoughts to come...

[Namira Galando · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think anyone should be allowed to describe a book as "psychedelic" or "dreamlike" until they've read something by Wilson Harris. Nothing can prepare you for the sheer mind expanding acid trip that is his prose. The only comparison I would venture is maybe Joseph McElroy; but McElroy's scope is nowhere near as mystical and cosmic. This is a difficult read, no doubt about that. I had to read the final chapters something like five times just to get a basic sense of their meaning. But time and attention to Harris's style yield incredible results. An essential author for anyone even remotely interested in the avant garde and post-colonial.

[PaperBird]

Discussed this book here: https://youtu.be/8MX-W35FtF0

[X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Temporally (tempo-rally) about halfway between Virginia Woolf and Kai Ashante Wilson, this book’s writing was *gorgeous* - I basically sped-read through because I wanted to hear the whole thing at once. It’s poetry in novella form. It’s genius. It’s also a little classic SFF, which I love too.

I had a hard time emotionally connecting with the characters, but I don’t know how much that was because I kept getting distracted trying to figure out if they were metaphors. (I’m open to suggestions otherwise but as far as I could tell that’s all the female characters were.)

Looking forward to reading about this (and rereading it at some point in the future, now that I know what happens and can take the story a little slower).

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was very cool, it's ostensibly about a voyage down a river in guiana in what seems to be a nod to heart of darkness but that's not really too important because most of the book is focused on dreamlike imagery and shifting of the narrative and he doesn't really care about conventional notions of plotting or characters. i found some of the similes a bit strained on occasion but there's a really unusual rhythm to the sentences that i got more and more into as the book went on.

"The murdered horseman of the savannahs, the skeleton footfall on the river bank and in the bush, the moonhead and crucifixion in the waterfall and in the river were over as though a cruel ambush of soul had partly lifted its veil and face to show that death was the shadow of a dream. In this remarkable filtered light it was not men of vain flesh and blood I saw toiling laboriously and meaninglessly, but active ghosts whose labour was indeed a flitting shadow over their shoulders as living men would don raiment and cast it off in turn to fulfil the simplest necessity of being. Wishrop was an excellent steersman. The boat swayed and moved harmoniously with every inclination of his body upon the great paddle. A lull fell upon the crew, transforming them, as it had changed Donne, into the drumming current of the outboard engine and of the rapid swirling water around every shadowy stone. All understanding flowed into Wishrop’s dreaming eternity, all essence and desire and direction, wished-for and longed-for since the beginning of time, or else focused itself in the eye of Vigilance’s spirit."

"I saw the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the spiritual eye of the soul. First it shed its leaves sudden and swift as if the gust of the wind that blew had ripped it almost bare. The bark and wood turned to lightning flesh and the sun which had been suspended from its head rippled and broke into stars that stood where the shattered leaves had been in the living wake of the storm. The enormous starry dress it now wore spread itself all around into a full majestic gown from which emerged the intimate column of a musing neck, face and hands, and twinkling feet. The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed."

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This unconventional, seminal work is only for the brave, but worth taking on for the richness of its images and for its definitive take on colonialsm. Folks who favor lyrical, nonlinear work will particularly take from it.

[Syme · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good that this book is summarised in the introduction, because I had no fucking clue what was going on. But that's apparently the whole point of the novel, and the writing is beautiful.

[Stephen Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A kind of mid-century Heart of Darkness, but steeped further in the cloudiness and undefined realms of dreams. Often that is a surprising and enjoyable place to be in a novel, but the obscurity suffocates some of the meaning and most of the "plot". It is hard to completely engage with something as intangible as this.

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 2 out of 5]

#88: Guyana 🇬🇾
I bought the complete Guyana Quartett in the hope to have found a nice series of novels about a Latin American country that I knew nothing about yet.
The book starts with two useless introductions, one by a Ishion Hutchison, who has an academic field day and manages to confuse the reader about the books he has not read yet; the second by the author himself, who doesn't fare much better.
The Peacock Palace as a novel can be summarised in one sentence: a group of dead people go down a river searching for a woman and, for the most part, die again without finding her.
In between all this exciting action, Harris is a wholesaler in meaningless sentences such as the following:

"After awhile this horrifying exchange of soul and this identification of themselves with each other brought them a partial return and renewal of confidence, a neighbourly wishful fulfilment and a basking in each other’s degradation and misery that they had always loved and respected."

Even though the novel is only 100 pages long, this style of writing gave me a considerable headache, left ke none the wiser about Guyana and I seriously doubt if I will ever want to read the rest of the series.

[Ed Lehman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh.....sorry...I see all the glowing reviews, but I found this "novel" to be a jumble of words signifying almost nothing.

[chiara · Rating 3 out of 5]

not gonna lie i had not a single clue of what was happening in this book at all. but it felt so beautiful, harris is great and writing long descriptive sentences. however, i feel the story gets lost within intricate description and overdone detailing.

overall did like; i think i’ll get the deeper meaning when i reread hopefully

[Marzia Leone · Rating 2 out of 5]

La trama poteva avere un grosso potenziale, ma la scrittura di Harris è troppo confusionaria. Da un punto di vista estetico è affascinante, ma ciò che arriva al lettore è troppo poco. Peccato, avevo grandi aspettative, magari proverò a rileggerlo più in là.

[Mason MB · Rating 5 out of 5]

written in sleepless reverie, surely!

[emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

“fever dream” is correct. maybe i’m just not smart enough to get this one tbh

[Adrian]

"Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed."

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars reflect my own limits more than anything about the book. Stars are stupid anyway.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the last pages of the Faber and Faber edition of Palace Kenneth Ramchand writes, "You may or may not be convinced by the novel's attempt to take us back to the original moment of creation, to sustainment by the undivided soul and anima in the universe. But its psychological truth is inescapable: the Palace of the Peacock, El Dorado, call it what you will, is inside us." Palace of the Peacock, then, can sustain favorable comparisons to Conrad. The geographic journeys are journeys into some interior space, though to call it "undivided" would be inaccurate. Does Harris's "deconstruction" (as Ramchand terms it) lead to a "psychological truth," or a psychoanalytic one? After all, Ramchand says of the narrator, "We know from the start that Donne and the dreamer [Ramchand's term for the narrator] are brothers or halves of the same person." Half, then, of an essentially lacking and split subject. But I need not belabor the point.

Harris follows a geographical journey that is a spiritual and psychological one. There are questions of reality and verisimilitude and more crucially of life and death. The tragedy that set the novel into motion is undone by the journey, and the tragedy of the journey is undone by the novel's conclusion. Harris constantly writes and rewrites tragedy and triumph.

Harris's formal experimentation is brilliant as always. Some of this novel's sentences are as glorious as the titular palace. Beyond that, the signifying play of the novel offers a great deal of intrigue. Harris uses names freely, referring to different people and things, and never naming some of the novel's most distinctive features. Each character, despite being vivid, is never fully distinct from the other crew members nor from their prior and subsequent incarnations. Harris calls individuality more broadly into question and posits a different kind of relation between people and between experiences. In one of the novel's best moments, one of the DaSilva twins wakes up bewildered about Cameron's death earlier in the text. "Ah dream Cameron dead too ... I had to stab at he to mek he loose me. And he still hold on ... I forgive he ... even if he mek me dream bad that a bewitched whore killed us both" (94). The reader, of course, witnessed this so-called dream happen first hand. Jennings takes the position of the reader, "is common knowledge you kill poor Cameron daSilva." This exchange is brilliant in its shifting of individuality, reality, and moral responsibility.

Harris masterfully prods the novel form as a familiar story unfolds.

[Jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book but I ended up finding it very hard going despite being an extremely small book. The prose are completely unique in their style but are extraordinarily clunky. The book could easily be far briefer than it already is. The plot itself is in theory excellent: a violent and unlikeable colonialist named Donne chases a woman who has run away from him. He used to be abusive to her. A crew follows him, a crew that has died completing the journey before, he perished with them. Local villagers fear them for they thought they were dead. They exist between life and death, following the river. The narrator, never named is among this crew and seems to be fairly passive throughout.

Unfortunately if I hadn't read a synopsis before, none of this would be very clear to me, it is quite opaque in its style and whilst at times searingly beautiful, it at other times makes little sense at all. If you are looking for inspiration, this is a good book to read but it certainly isn't going to be for everyone and I ended up loosing the plot several times despite already knowing what it was.

[Will Yagodich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book, you’re comfortably riding in a small boat through the jungle, so disconnected from civilization that it’s only a mere thing of the past. And as you ride past the trees and other plants, eventually, they slowly begin to morph into the fuzziness that occurs when you press onto the outer part of your eyelids. Everything you’ve ever known transforms into a new reality where dreams become physical and soon enough, what you thought you knew is blurred before logical comprehension. Love, memory, beauty—all are presented to you in a way that, for the first time, allows you to see them. And, at last, as you begin to watch the music of eternity, you realize that everything you’ve ever sought after no longer exists. Thus, this deluge of language drowns you into oblivion while chords of memory transport you to a fractal of conceptual time.

[James Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harris is a masterful and unique voice. In this tale of John Donne hacking his way up river in Guyana is reminiscent of Heart of Darkness excepting that in this novel, there is no heart, and thus no subsequent dark centre, and the characters are already dead and gone anyway. Choose your own Donne to accompany you on this phantasmagorical and eerie voyage, and dream, like the characters do, of what life was like before death and how death is just another dream anyway. A puzzling, sometimes troubling read, this novel is rich and rewarding both in its poetic style and its philosophical yearning.

[Jesse Cheshire · Rating 3 out of 5]

tried so hard to love this (sorry ethan) but was simply too abstract for me. the first section is really excellent and throughout there is some incredibly interesting language and imagery but often it seemed to lack enough meaning to hold it together. like a lot of other reviewers i think it is really good at what its doing and I can confidently say I’ve never read anything like it before, just not for me at this time. Maybe will read again when wiser.