It is implicit in Tumatumari that man, if he is to survive the imminent danger of self-annihilation, will have to free and transform his imagination so that it will be able to work in harmony with the fundamental laws of change and re-creation, rather than, catastrophically, to resist them.

Imagination is embodied in Tumatumari in the 'heroine' Prudence, this novel's representative of Man. She is the 'soul of man' awakening in a transitional age that may have already begun, feeling at last the need to develop and transform itself if the family of Man is to continue. To understand herself and her needs and desires, she reaches into memory, the well of the past. The search for the significance of the history of her own family, a middle-class 'mixed' family in Guyana, leads to an exploration of twentieth-century civilization generally, as symbolized by the life of this single 'civilized' family, and expands further into an exploration of the relationship between the twentieth century in Guyana (the land of Harris's birth and development) and other times and other places. Only in this broader search can Prudence find her own real identity, her identity with the whole human family, its evolutionary past, its complex present, and its two possible futures, not yet determined in this 'moment' of history. The implications of Prudence's search reach out without limit backward in time, outward without limit into space, and inward from one horizon of imagination to the next.

The implication is that in Tumatumari Harris, too, set out to put the history of his own family and country together, and that out of the immersion of his imagination in this material, Tumatumari, with its constantly widening implications, developed. For to Harris, the story of Guyana and its different peoples is charged with the deepest meanings and the largest questions. Out of his continuously widening exploration as he created Tumatumari came the questions: Of what contradictory elements is the civilization of our age composed? Out of what womb did it come? Is it capable or incapable of giving birth in its turn? Is civilization now a totally barren thing truly lusting for self-destruction? If not, is it capable of a new kind of conception, a conception of something new, capable of surviving after its birth …? Will the breakdown of life in this century and the consequent sense of the imminence of danger give mankind the necessary humility to surrender long-cherished but long-outworn and now barren concepts and idolatries? Can so-called 'modern Man' bear to face himself as still no more than primitive, living by primitive concepts, still offering living sacrifices to his gods, still sacrificing himself and others in the name of separate 'incestuous' family or nation, tribe or race?… Can concern for the individual family and concern for the whole human family be fused by imagination, giving birth to an entirely new conception—that of an integrated, unalienated, creative and truly human Man? And, to return to Guyana in a broader, non-national sense, does the Central and South American 'new world', the melting pot of ancient and new, and of many races and cultures, have, perhaps, the best potential for being the crucible of change in the world today?

The interaction of this rich mass of questions and material with Harris's highly-cultivated and informed twentieth-century mind and fluid imagination results in what is undoubtedly one of the most complex novels ever written. Reading and re-reading Tumatumari is a gruelling as well as a rewarding experience; it is a rigorous challenge to the reading ability and imagination of the reader.

One sign of the complexity of Tumatumari is that, in comparison with it, Harris's previous novel, The Waiting Room, can be described as relatively straightforward! A few comparisons with the earlier novel may help to put Tumatumari in perspective (in so far as its 'method' is concerned)…. (p. 22)

In the earlier novel it was possible for the reader, once he saw the main thread, to follow it through the labyrinth of the book. But Tumatumari has innumerable intertwining threads, moving up and down as well as across; it is densely-matted, very much like the mat of half-submerged vegetation which Prudence lifts out of the river at the beginning of the book. In its density and complexity it is a counterpart of the material under consideration, the complex fabric of twentieth-century civilization in which are caught up innumerable strands of the past, even the ancient past before man was man.

In The Waiting Room there are only two characters and their role is soon seen as symbolic and complementary; they represent all dynamic and fulfilling 'opposites'. But Tumatumari has a dozen characters, no two exactly complementary, or contrasting, or simply 'individual' but all in some respect 'equivalent' to each other, so that all their significances are interwoven, until finally all the other characters merge into Prudence as she takes on the significance of humanity as a whole, on the hairline of transition to a new age—whatever that age will prove to be. Incorporating them all, she may, like the phoenix, be capable of being reborn, because she becomes capable of entering into the others (of past and present) and of letting them enter into and become part of her.

Tumatumari is different from The Waiting Room also in its imagery. Whereas The Waiting Room was made up of a set of related images, Tumatumari contains a myriad of images which do not resemble each other—images deriving from physics and microphysics, mathematics, chemistry, anthropology, economics, genetics and the study of evolution, and much more: images which are only slowly seen as related or 'equivalent' to others in some respect, and then only in a philosophical sense; these relationships are not 'visualizable', as were the waves and echoes of The Waiting Room, but are extremely abstract, involving such concepts as 'reciprocity' or 'interpenetration' of elements. Only near the end of the novel (in the section on the Canje River area) are the abstract relationships envisioned in a stunning artistic synthesis of almost all the novel's themes and concepts to that point.

With The Waiting Room it is possible to speak of the basic shape of the novel, as epitomized by the spiral seashell near the end. Tumatumari, however, has rather a shaping than a shape, a continuous growth and retaking of shape much like the gestation and evolutionary processes taking place in the various wombs in the novel: the physical wombs, the womb of history, and the wall-less wombs of space and imagination. All the developments come to be seen as part of 'chains' of development, one thing growing within and then out of another which then disintegrates and yet lives on in the new, part of a continuity of overlapping rings or clasps. (pp. 22-3)

Gestation and evolutionary processes take place also in history as it is viewed in Tumatumari, and the images of wombs, gateways, doors, passages of entry and passages of exodus have many variations in the work. Guyana (in its larger geographical, not national, sense) is seen as being like the Mediterranean of the past, a gateway between the past and the future. The history of the country of Guyana (that was British Guiana), which has been one of de facto racial separation and discrimination, is also conceived of in these images. (p. 23)

This kind of conception of the world, with its emphasis on dynamic change and evolutionary processes, expresses Wilson Harris's pervading scientific view of all aspects of human life, biological, psychological and social. The result, in Tumatumari, is a rare synthesis of scientific outlook, philosophy and art. Harris seems to share the belief of the physicist de Broglie, that modern scientific approaches have enormous philosophical implications, illuminating realities of all kinds. (pp. 23-4)

There is in Tumatumari a thorough 'interpenetration' and interaction of the philosophical, scientific and artistic conceptions. This is one of the book's strengths, but it is at the same time one of the things that makes the reading so difficult. For example, because the content and form are so completely one, the development of Tumatumari is not novelistic or even literary in any usual sense, unless we are to conceive of the work as a long poem, which in a way it is. Its development is more musical than anything else: a prelude states the theme, but in disguise; then comes the appearance in a kind of hide-and-seek, of the various elements of the story that Prudence raises up from the well of memory; this is followed by the coming together of the significances of these memories and he emergence of the underlying themes and rhythms, which brings the work to a climax; then in the last section there is a restatement on a new level of the question implied in the prelude, and the work closes with a series of chords that are left suspended, suggesting a further development in the silence that follows. Eventually the reader who has come so far returns to the prelude which is now seen not only as an introduction to the work but as a kind of allegorical summary of it. Until this process of the development of the novel is perceived, the difficulties of following the 'story' are great. (p. 24)

In the main body of the work, in the search for her own significance and real desires, Prudence searches the paths which have led to her. The principal figure in her past is her father, Henry Tenby, head of a Guyanese middle-class family until his death in 1957. He is the novel's symbol of the dominant outlook and way of life of the first half of the twentieth century. (p. 25)

Prudence comes to understand him as representative of Man in the age of individualism and free enterprise, who is in truth as unfree as possible. Placarded by history as being the soul of freedom, he wears chains of gold upon his heart and wrist. Prudence's feeling for him years later is a feeling of compassion. She sees him as unable to advance far beyond the limits of the past out of which he came. She sees both him and her husband Roi as manifestations of Man in the two major periods of this century, the periods following each of the world wars…. (p. 27)

[Roi] is shown to be like the ancient 'divine king' whose life, it was believed, had to be sacrificed when there came a breakdown in the life of the people. But Harris implies that no such outworn primitive rituals and idolatries can save twentieth-century Man, who must himself accept the responsibility for his fate, not shift it to any god or gods. No sacrifices will help except the sacrifice of outworn conceptions, such as the idea that the world is inevitably made up of hunter and hunted. The only hope of survival lies in more deeply scientific knowledge of nature and its processes and in the renewal of man's own creative power. Man himself must be the creator of the new Man. His future depends on himself. (p. 28)

In Tumatumari, then, the central figure or symbol is Man himself, in his manifestations in various periods in his whole history, during which he has lived in many different societies and within the wider environment of nature—within the womb of space and time. The title of Tumatumari derives from the idea of nature and its processes in time ('Tumatumari' is said to mean 'sleeping rocks'). The scene of Tumatumari suggests that in time even rocks crack, and imaginations awaken, and sudden leaps in development take place.

In contrast, the titles of the five sub-divisions of the book derive from social forms and concepts, those that have lasted beyond their time, that once were meaningful, perhaps, but which now are death-dealing. They represent old ideas that can have meaning now not as binding, rock-like traditions and idolatries, but only as 'transformed and transforming' tradition, meaningful for this age…. It is the originality and independence of spirit that is still valid and not the long outworn interpretations of life and nature. (p. 29)

In spite of the almost indescribable difficulty of Tumatumari as a whole, large sections of it read along smoothly enough, and many passages can be enjoyed for their sheer sensuous beauty (while others read like the output of a computer). The novel can be read simply as 'experience'; in fact this novel, like all of Harris's novels, should be read for the first time in just this way and not primarily for the intellectual pleasure of it. What will happen with this kind of relaxed approach to it is that some of the underlying philosophical significance will gradually come through to provide illumination for subsequent readings in which intellectual perceptions and sense perceptions will be united.

Many aspects of the novel that seemed to stand out as flaws in early readings of Tumatumari took on an essential logic and authority of their own in subsequent readings, although this reader continues to find unsatisfying Harris's way of handling, in a kind of lecture exposition, the 'moment of articulation' by the character who has plumbed his own depths and arrived as a new conception of himself and the world (Christo in The Whole Armour, the lover in The Waiting Room, and to a lesser extent Prudence in Tumatumari). In his essays Harris speaks of the need for writers to discover new, fresh potentialities of language. Harris, himself, in all his works, shows that he is capable of making such discoveries. (p. 30)