The dark jester

Wilson Harris is one of the truly unique literary talents of the Caribbean. His novel The Dark Jester recounts Pizarro's conquest of Peru in a fictional meditation on the encounter between Spanish colonial ambition and Inca civilisation and the spiritual and cultural consequences of this meeting. Harris imagines a dialogue, implicit and explicit, between the conquistador and Atahualpa, the ruler of the Incas, being held to ransom until a room is filled with golden artefacts brought from all over the kingdom. Implicit in this, is the author's ambition to reclaim as a source of inspiration, not only the history and pre-history of the Americas, but the very landscape itself.