With Palace of the Peacock Wilson Harris staked out a corner of his own in the rich new field of Caribbean writing, and his third novel, The Whole Armour, shows him still digging in the same spot. What he brings up is a mixture of local legend … and Christian allegory…. Other key influences are Hopkins and Blake….

Mr. Harris does hint towards the end that roots must be understood and accepted before the past can be buried, and his characters certainly typify different degrees of this understanding—which does not automatically come, we gather, with education…. But it is hard work to extract a precise moral [from The Whole Armour] since the story is told in a highly personal way: reality, dream, and psychic experience are indistinguishably vivid, and the regional collective unconsciousness is never far below the surface.

What justifies this difficult approach is the imaginative power...