The novels of Wilson Harris … form one ongoing whole. Each work is individual; yet the whole sequence can be seen as a continuous, ever-widening exploration of civilization and creative art. The Ascent to Omai …, for instance, took subjective consciousness to a point beyond which further communication seemed impossible. This was answered, after two excursions into the realm of folklore, with Black Marsden …, in which the creative imagination is Marsden, a trickster/illusionist whom the artist hero finally throws into the street. In Companions of the Day and Night the hero of Black Marsden is sent manuscripts by Marsden himself which he orders into an assertion of the creative interpenetration of history and imagination….

Wilson Harris [recently] explained his present preoccupation with moments in which a suppressed cultural pattern erupts through a decaying later one. In Black Marsden, it was Scottish history in Edinburgh. In [Companions of the Day and Night], it is Mexico City, where Christian and Western patterns overlie traditional cultures going back to pre-Conquest Toltec times. Recurrent archetypes are the focus for conflicting cultural strata; and the naked, creative, suffering human spirit is embodied in the Fool, Nameless, or Christ, with his answering image of spiritual love, Mary or Beatrice. In the ancient Mexican religion he was a human sacrifice; in the Catholic conquest, the figure of Christ; in the modern world, a political martyr.

The Fool is in Mexico City. It is a modern Easter, with the mingling of Christian and pagan rituals. He encounters a fireeater performing in the waning light against a ruined building, and falls into a trance. As his consciousness expands, he becomes the Christ figure, seeking the virgin associated with the Easter rituals. He moves backwards and forwards through time, and outward towards the new world of North America. To reach understanding is to be crucified by a blind world. At the Easter weekend the Fool is found crushed below a sacrificial pyramid of the sun.

This summary bears little relation to the experience of reading the book, a surrealist and hallucinatory prose-poem. Time and place, even the logic of language, are violated to attempt a new alchemy of awareness….

Companions of the Day and Night is not Wilson Harris's finest novel. It does not have the architectonic strength of Tumatumari or the better known Palace of the Peacock. The surrealist fantasy weakens the texture of the sacrificial drama. But never has the wily magician Black Marsden created more startling effects, or Mr Harris's extraordinary use of language been more assured.