Lindsay Clarke emerged in the late 1980s as a significant new voice in the contemporary British novel. His innovations in subject matter and literary form appear in works ranging from the postcolonial novel of Africa to the postmodern integration of occult spirituality and literary romance. Combining social and political anxieties with inner vision, Clarke's novels are quest narratives that evoke African spirituality, alchemy, Jungian theory, Celtic legends, and medieval romances. He is a self-consciously literary writer, whose novels exemplify his belief, expressed in the introduction to his new version of Celtic myths (1997), that reality is a "mythological function of the human imagination." It is the aim of imaginative literature to facilitate psychic and spiritual development by producing stories that point to "other" deeper and unrepresentable realities. Clarke sees postmodernism as a liberation from traditional literary realism and from conventional notions of reality, not a spiritless condition of a...