The present need for what Nicholas Mosley called an "intelligent language of crisis" capable, through paradox and allusion, of holding apparent opposites together, is a practical concern of Wilson Harris's writing. His novels, a continually deepening exploration of "the problem of opposite tendencies", use paradoxical, allusive language … to convey the interdependence of opposites: "strong", sovereign cultures, "weak" or vanished civilizations.

The hero of Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness is married and lives in a Kensington flat. He is a composite man. Born in Brazil of Spanish, Portuguese and African stock, orphaned early, he survives cyclone and flood and is adopted by the British ambassador. He grows up in England with access to his rich benefactor's library and thrives on a varied cultural diet; an interest in painting develops and he gradually becomes convinced that his "parentless" condition obliges him to create, to "paint" himself and his world anew. Seeing everything in terms of his art, he discovers new "illuminations" and "unpredictable densities" within the most apparently solid and uniform people and places. As his "paintings" multiply, the range of his awareness widens, relationships deepen….

Genesis of the Clowns emerges from the brooding recollections of Frank Wellington, who also lives in a London flat: Wellington, a government land surveyor in British Guiana in the 1940s, had settled in Britain in 1954. One morning in the 1970s he receives an anonymous letter telling him of the death of Hope, the black foreman of a survey team he had led thirty years ago in the interior. At the same time a letter from a solicitor in Hope Street, Dunfermline, brings news of a small inheritance through the death of a relative in Scotland. It is the first of a number of related coincidences. His now receptive mind drifts back into the past where he is, once again, leader and paymaster of a racially mixed crew. As the ghosts of the men again come forward to the paytable, Wellington finds that his relationship with each has been subtly altered.

These two novels [Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns] are complementary explorations of modern existence. The fallen blossoms swirling "in circles and counter-circles" along Holland Villas Road conjure up the contrary undercurrents of Wellington's river surveys as well as those of "revolutionary" Guyanese politics and society (and of societies in general). The tent-like Commonwealth Institute of Da Silva etc reappears as Wellington's fragile tent, the collapse of which, during a thunderstorm, forces him to question his role as father-figure and colonial "master" of all he surveys through the inverting eye of his theodolite. Both painter and surveyor, the complementary worlds of art and science, recognize the need for a revolution of sensibility, a new "circulation of the light"