SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. Review of The Angel at the Gate, by Wilson Harris. World Literature Today 58, no. 1 (winter 1984): 152.

In the following negative review, Thorpe argues that The Angel at the Gate is only accessible to “seasoned” readers accustomed to Harris's “opaque” narrative style.

Wilson Harris's novels are psychical “expeditions,” negotiable only by seasoned voyagers attuned to spatial narrative woven of incremental correspondences and image clusters, the splitting and doubling of character and action (“mutualities”), motifs of vision, transfiguration, flight and ascent, parallel inner and outer universes, dreams of paradisiacal wholeness, interspersed with key terms in the author's metaphysics. This is itself a quest for a sacred pattern or “law of love,” an ever-present “wall” of possibility—“the conversion of casualty that exists in each moment” (echoing Eliot), dissolving seeming fixities of race, personality, inheritance, time and history.

The “automatic narrative” of The Angel at the Gate is explicitly...