In the first novel [of the "Guiana Quartet"], Palace of the Peacock, a man called Donne is going up-river to collect labour for his estate, but the reader must soon relinquish his grasp on such a workaday circumstance and commit himself, as it were, to the poetry of motion through a dark interior where words like death and dream are almost synonymous, where Donne and his crew exist in a limbo compounded of myth and reality. The disastrous journey becomes a struggle not so much to survive, one feels, as actually to re-create a world, "a window on to the universe"—by which perhaps is meant a vantage point from which to watch the rest of the quartet unfold. Or, the reader may wonder, perhaps there has simply been laid the first of the four biblical cornerstones of Creation, Fall, Flood and Messiah? If so, to what particular...