Palace of the Peacock

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This is my second Note or short preface to Palace of the Peacock. My first was actually an amendment in 1988 to a Note on the Genesis of the Guyana Quartet, when the four novels constituting the Quartet (of which Palace is the first) were collected and issued in one volume in 1985.

Kenneth Ramchand, the Caribbean scholar, wrote an introductory piece to the first paperback edition of Palace in 1968.

It is useful now, I think, as the 1990s draw to a close, to bring into some relief certain features in Palace which respond to a creative ferment that has been happening in the Americas since 1960 when the novel first appeared.

That ferment is curiously relevant, I find, to the body of fiction I have written through The Guyana Quartet and succeeding novels up to the latest, Jonestown.

Critics now see Palace within a context of “magical realist” fiction and therefore relevant, across the years, to an innovative tradition that has become fashionable, though scarcely articulated or considered in 1960.

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