Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy

The Tree of the SunDa Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness

The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat.

'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully,

A fictional re-imagining of the real-life ritual mass suicide orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in the remote Guyana forest in 1978.

The trilogy comprises (1985), (1987) and (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre, traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from self-destruction.'

' is a kind of quantum … in which the association of ideas is not logical but… a "magical imponderable dreaming". The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos, like Everyman Masters in and Robin Redbreast Glass in … Together, they represent one of the most remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon.'

"'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?… It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell…'"

In "Companions of the Day and Night" (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier "Black Marsden" — chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's fiction.

A tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana. In this novel, first published in 1960, can be traced the poetic vision, the themes and the designs of Harris's subsequent work, which included "The Guyana Quartet".

'What [Wilson] Harris is doing is to extend the boundaries of our very conception of fiction.' Robert Nye.

First published in 1982, is offered to readers as Wilson Harris's analysis and interpretation of the 'automatic writing' of 'Mary Stella Holiday': an assumed name for the secretary and patient of the late Father Joseph Marsden.

'Mary suffered from a physical and nervous as makes clear. Through Marsden — the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her 'automatic talents' — that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for 'Stella' (apart from 'Mary') in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of association in past and present 'fictional lives.'' (From Harris's introductory 'Note.')

When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed diary — or 'log book', as Susan Forrestal called it. She had suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after three operations, left her almost blind.