Palace of the Peacock is a 150-page definition of mystical experience given in the guise of a novel. It is a difficult book to read, yet it is the very concreteness of Mr. Harris's imagery that makes its denseness so hard to penetrate….

[Although] Mr. Harris's book gives the illusion of moving forward like an ordinary novel, its real movement is downward: it is an exploration in depth. By its end nothing is changed—not even those members of the crew drowned a second time; it is simply that the inner eye is opened.

Told in "a mixed futuristic order of memory and event" (the phrase is the narrator's), this work is in many ways startlingly like Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre, even down to the symbol of the boat. And it can stand the comparison. Like that poem, it slides away before any attempt to catch it in a net of paraphrase. No description can get its essence: it is what it is. Mr. Harris has certain peculiarities of style that are mild irritants: words come in pairs as regularly as phrases do in the Psalms ("a haze and a dream"; "a climb and clamber"). But even this is not mere tricksiness—which anyway might be excusable in a first novel: between the two words with their hard-and-fast meaning falls the shadow of what the author wants to say. The near-repetition intensifies the air of incantation that permeates the whole book.

However déréglé he may be, Mr. Harris is never woolly…. And this concern with the concrete makes this the best of books for communicating the feel of British Guiana: better than a dozen laborious travel-books, or adventure-stories for ever getting caught up in their own machinery.