The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris long ago rejected realist fiction because of its “authoritarian” reliance on event and circumstance, and developed a different method in his own work. His prose cultivates ambiguity—not in the playful manner of postmodernism, which in the Harris cosmos is irresponsible frivolity—but in order not to foreclose on possibilities by precision. His language aspires to express “multitudinous life”: the simultaneous existence of past and present, life and death, the visible and the invisible. In this respect, his fiction resists being processed into the “strait-jacket” of meaning, and values above everything “multi-layered luminosities” and “numinous exactitudes” of experience. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill is his twenty-first novel, and it covers very familiar Harris terrain.

As in his last three novels, Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal and The Four Banks of the River of Space (reissued by Faber as The Carnival Trilogy), the central debate in this fiction is conducted through myth and literature: Dante, Faust, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Walter de la Mare's “The Listeners” figure in varying degrees. But the underlying concerns are familiar, the responsibility of the individual in “the waste land,” the need to create a “life of conscience,” the triumph of paradox over the absolute. This edition has a valuable introduction by Harris himself, which argues the connection between the novels and begins to look forward to Resurrection at Sorrow Hill.

Sorrow Hill is at the confluence of the Essequebo, Mazaruni and Cuyuni rivers in the interior of Guyana. It is a place of merged cultures and histories, and a confluence of “spaces” of existence, a “precipitation” of human endeavour. “An asylum for the greats” is established here, counting among its inmates Monty the Venezuelan, who is also Montezuma, king of the Aztecs, Len the Brazilian, who is Leonardo da Vinci, and a number of other “greats”—Socrates, Buddha, Karl Marx, etc. Their doctor is Daemon, who hectors and encourages them to play out parables of human dilemmas. The whole comedy is the work of another inmate, Hope, which “Wilson Harris” has edited. Harris is fond of inserting the novelist into his novels, so that the book appears to be a collaborative effort between author and character. That Hope is also a maker of fiction endorses the transformative powers of art, and figures the artist as an involuntary recipient of the gift of life, or what Harris calls “the genius of Love.” Hope's arch-adversary is Christopher D'eath, who like every other figure in Harris's novel is divided—in this case between the Christ-like part of himself and that characterized as death, which is the desire of power and ascendancy through violence. In this sense, the novel's existence is a triumph of Hope over D'eath.

Christopher D'eath has several reasons to be cross with Hope, among them his affair with Butterfly, D'eath's mistress. But the antagonists are also playing out rehearsed parts, enacting repeated histories. Killings recur as ritual, the sacrifice of innocence to meaningless violence, each death repeated infinitely. This is South America five centuries after the Spanish Conquest and after slaughter by the Dutch, the English, the French, and the enslavement and transportation of Africans; after indentures and drownings. Hope feels so surrounded by death that even the aftermath of the act of love feels like “a precarious resurrection.” The question at the heart of Hope's book is: how can the human mind be thawed into compassion? It is a question addressed with passion and seriousness in the parable which the inmates of the asylum play out. In the central parables, Montezuma desires revenge for the chaos which followed the Conquest, speaking in this case for “the desperation of victim cultures.” But the desire for revenge releases and feeds other violences. For where there has been dismemberment, Hope suggests, “there is the creative necessity to visualize re-membermemt.” History needs to be re-envisioned rather than replayed in reverse.

The section on Leonardo, though not as effectively done, debates the question of guilt and conscience. It is resolved by the equally optimistic argument that the cruelties had come alongside creativity, and that acts of admission and conscience will release the power of such knowledge to transform both present and past. Harris calls this “sin-eating,” a process by which civilization admits guilt for the cruelties it inflicted on its victims, and so releases them from injustice. For this to come about, both self-knowledge and faith are necessary, otherwise the ambition to transform is only hubris. And even in Daemon, the figure who in the end becomes the mast-head of the craft which descends with its redemptive burden to Sorrow Hill, nihilism and faith are contending forces.

Resurrection at Sorrow Hill requires “the closest attention to density,” to borrow one of his phrases, and anyone familiar with Harris's work will realize that what is offered here is a very untangled summary. His metaphors come heavily laden, and his narrative, though full of striking images and phrases, is constructed from a language which is obstinate and difficult. Despite its passion, the narrative gaze is also self-forgiving, dramatizing the speaking ego as anguished but principled, approving its tones of concern. Though the novel approves ambivalence and flux, and rejects “the hubris of one-sided human discourse,” its high-handed accents at times come close to the authoritarian voice which Harris rejected so early in his career.