The West Indies is surely one of the places the English novel may look to for plasma: to Andrew Salkey, Garth St Omer, Peter Marshall, and the wildly poetic Wilson Harris, who writes in Ascent to Omai like an academic on an acid trip. Europe, Africa, the East, and the new world; a reference to Odin's ravens followed by one about Julius Reuter's pigeons—here is a writer from Guyana, a culture that is part old Europe, part the mysterious Zen East, and part slave-dark Africa, and somehow he is able to encompass it all, be aware of it all and use it. But he is difficult. The reader can't keep up, catch the wild use of language, the dreamy slides and slips of plot from present to past, the use of omens (what are omens to us but a cliché word of political reporters?), omens used as practical devices of plot. But the language is hypnotic. I read some parts out loud and doing that caught the marvellous repetitions, the poetry of it, without understanding the meaning. At its worst—and this could be a recommendation to many—the style is like one of those obscure pop songs…. Wilson Harris, towards the end of the novel explains his style:

My intention, in part, is to repudiate the vicarious novel—vicarious sex-mask, death-mask—where the writer, following a certain canon of clarity, claims to enter the most obscure and difficult terrain of experience without incurring a necessary burden of authenticity, obscurity or difficulty at the same time.

This is one of the simplest, most straightforward sentences in the book, but Mr Harris is quite right and the lazy reader is wrong; the novel is dying because the trick of the vicarious thrill has been tumbled and Mr Harris's poetic voodoo is one way back to health.