In the first novel [of the "Guiana Quartet"], Palace of the Peacock, a man called Donne is going up-river to collect labour for his estate, but the reader must soon relinquish his grasp on such a workaday circumstance and commit himself, as it were, to the poetry of motion through a dark interior where words like death and dream are almost synonymous, where Donne and his crew exist in a limbo compounded of myth and reality. The disastrous journey becomes a struggle not so much to survive, one feels, as actually to re-create a world, "a window on to the universe"—by which perhaps is meant a vantage point from which to watch the rest of the quartet unfold. Or, the reader may wonder, perhaps there has simply been laid the first of the four biblical cornerstones of Creation, Fall, Flood and Messiah? If so, to what particular Guianan purpose? Is one in the end to come to nothing more enlivening than a parable of political emergence?

The task that faces the reader who is unfamiliar with West Indian myth and symbol is enormous, but for a time the biblical connotation seems to hold out promise of guidance on the journey through savannah and jungle, through "the doom of the river and the waterfall". In the second novel, Far Journey of Oudin, part-titles like The Covenant, and The Second Birth, are made to the expected measure, and the title of the third novel, The Whole Armour (a quotation from Ephesians, vi, 13: "Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God"), suggests a point of total comprehension not far ahead. But in spite of these signposts, and others within the novels themselves, it is upon a growing sense of being borne up by forces no longer alien in a landscape increasingly imaginable that the reader eventually depends….

If a first reading of the quartet does not uncover anything like the whole of the relationship the two middle novels need to bear to the first and last to rank as structurally indispensable, it does show them as indispensable in the business of conditioning the mind to immediate recognition of the fact that in the end of the quartet is its beginning.

The story in The Secret Ladder which we might have taken at its face value—of Fenwick, the young West Indian land-surveyor, charting the upper reaches of the Canje river and falling foul of a settlement ruled by an old African—we take instead in a mood, corresponding to Fenwick's, of "inner rhapsody and grotesque meditation". We have an understanding, if not exactly the measure, of what is really at stake: not the destruction of the settlement by flooding as a result of a new irrigation scheme but the destruction of a "perception of depth more lasting than time", and of the moral privilege and right of a place that has acquired "the stamp of a multiple tradition and heritage".

But what does this mean? Fenwick, in whom there is African, English, French, and Amerindian blood, says of his confrontation with the old African (Poseidon): "I wish I could truly grasp the importance of this meeting. If I do not—if my generation do not—leviathan will swallow us." Is this a plea for the preservation of something that is being lost in Guiana, something purely African? If so, is it a political or a cultural loss? Or is Poseidon, this descendant of a runaway slave whose lips do not seem to Fenwick to move in unison with his speech, to be seen as the repository of an "emotional dynamic of liberation" that no longer guides a nation's conscience or consciousness?

In a final paragraph epitomizing the quarter Mr. Harris leaves Fenwick in a doubt we no longer really feel ourselves because the concept of that lost dynamic reaches beyond poetic Guianan imagery into our own human and national awareness….

Quarter or no, the four novels culminating in The Secret Ladder are clearly the work of a man who should not be described as a West Indian writer in the narrow, restrictive sense of the words. He is a novelist of already distinguished talent writing in English out of a common perception, a particular experience, and a unique vision.