SOURCE: Tayler, Christopher. “Dreaming with Atahualpa and Faust.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5113 (30 March 2001): 25.

In the following review, Tayler describes Harris's writing style in The Dark Jester as “romantic modernism,” observing that the characters are “the fragmentary manifestations of a kind of cross-cultural world-spirit immanent within the mind of the dreaming narrator.”

In November 1532, in what is now Peru, Francisco Pizarro arrived at the city of Cajamarca with a force of about 180 men and requested an audience with Atahualpa, the Inca Emperor. Atahualpa—who only that year had defeated his half-brother Huascar in a civil war—seems to have both underestimated Pizarro and misinterpreted his intentions. On November 16, Atahualpa arrived at the meeting place with several thousand apparently unarmed retainers. When the fairly brusque demands made by the Spaniards were rejected, the Incas were massacred by the invaders' guns, artillery and horsemen. He himself was captured, and, although the...