The Guyana Quartet

This dreamlike masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris' centenary. I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... British Guiana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands; a colony haunted by the enduring legacies of slavery and murder. A riverboat crew led charts a quest seeking indigenous peoples to exploit as plantation labour; but their journey becomes a spiritual voyage towards the Palace of the Peacock ... A genius money-lender, illegitimate child, and beggar become entangled in a strange drama that illuminates how slavery's descendants struggle to achieve true freedom ... A man accused of a murder he didn't commit is on the run in the jungle swamplands; but as his innocence is disputed, he stages his death, entering a hallucinatory otherworld ... A government surveyour captaining a boat crew encounters an elderly local man who accuses him of unfair dealings and threatens rebellion, building to a nightmarish climax ... Reissued as a new omnibus with a foreword by Ishion Hutchinson to mark Sir Wilson Harris' centenary, The Guyana Quartet - The Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder - is a dazzling, mythic, epic masterpiece, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago. The Guyanese William Blake ... [Such] poetic intensity. -- Angela Carter