SOURCE: Morton, Brian. “The Voyage In.” New Statesman & Society 6, no. 278 (12 November 1993): 39.

In the following positive review, Morton focuses on the central themes of Resurrection at Sorrow Hill and The Carnival Trilogy.

Stephen Hawking is to the postmodern novel what J. W. Dunne and An Experiment with Time were to early Modernism. Both provide a consoling objectification of creativity that demands no recourse to psychology. For most readers, Hawking's invocation of God was a satisfying cadence rather than a disturbing philosophical crux; for hadn't God just been dispensed with?

The problem is essentially the same with the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, except that Harris' fiction begins with the death of God and enacts the resurrection of meaning, as it were backwards, from the singular mystery of the Creation. The central drama of Harris' work, from The Palace of the Peacock (1960) onwards, is the validation of dream and the confounding...