Palace of the Peacock is a 150-page definition of mystical experience given in the guise of a novel. It is a difficult book to read, yet it is the very concreteness of Mr. Harris's imagery that makes its denseness so hard to penetrate….

[Although] Mr. Harris's book gives the illusion of moving forward like an ordinary novel, its real movement is downward: it is an exploration in depth. By its end nothing is changed—not even those members of the crew drowned a second time; it is simply that the inner eye is opened.

Told in "a mixed futuristic order of memory and event" (the phrase is the narrator's), this work is in many ways startlingly like Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre, even down to the symbol of the boat. And it can stand the comparison. Like that poem, it slides away before any attempt to catch it in...