In Ascent to Omai time and space are truly elastic, so that events in
recent time become part of remote geological time and the boundaries
between events and remembering, individual persons and different
locations are fluid and permeable. Victor is in search of his father,
Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago
for burning down the factory he works in. Since then Victor has lost
touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold
prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana - now the
site of one of the largest open-cast goldmines in the world and the site
of immense environmental degradation. Prophetically, the clash between
the material/technological and the primordial/spiritual is one of the
intercutting themes of the novel, connecting to the El Doradean myth so
central to the Guyanese imagining.
As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past
relationship with him and replays his father's trial, which also becomes
his own, in a way that echoes the "Nighttown" episode of Ulysses, though
unlike Bloom's. Victor's offences are not sexual, but represent
blockages in the openness of his thinking. Victor's search is for
spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a
true understanding of the world he exists in, though Harris refuses to
"impose a false coherency upon material one had to digest" and the
reader is invited to share in Victor's struggling ascent to
consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.
