Mr Harris makes me feel cloddish and insensitive. [In Palace of the Peacock he's] taken a Christian-Creation sequence of seven days and piled it round with enough complex archetypes to keep a myth-critic busy for life. On one level the setting is the savannahs and forests of British Guiana; on another the inscape of Donne, an educated atavist leading an expedition to the interior…. I never quite know what's going on in this novel…. Its claustrophobic density reminds me of The Emperor Jones; but Mr Harris has an abstract rhetoric all of his own, and he wraps it like glass wool round the often vigorous talk of the characters. He also works to death the words 'dreaming' and 'musing'; but no repeated motif could guide us through a texture so muddy and a structure so daedal.

And yet, having confessed that this short fable maddens and baffles me, I must applaud stretches of pared, articulate narrative, the lilt of many rhetorically oblique conversations, and the authentic portrayal of a forest people who use surnames only—no frills in the lush mazes of vegetation. This is a religious, violent, often private piece of writing, in places ap-pallingly turgid but in others virile, disciplined and vivid. Mr Harris is a fertile writer; having got this farrago out of his system he should now aim at steadiness, and learn to apply the knife.

Paul West, "New Novels: 'Palace of the Peacock'," in New Statesman (© 1960 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. LX, No. 1537, August 27, 1960, p. 282.