Womb of Space,” contains six essays which explore the American literary imagination, focusing on Harris's belief that the conventional novel is incapable of revealing the true extent of the subconscious imagination. Looking to writers as diverse as Melville, Faulkner and Ellison, Harris is not only at his most provocative in this section, but he is also at his most convincing. His observations of the various authors' narrative “failures” are accompanied by scrupulously detailed exempla. Harris is sure that

the cross-cultural picture of ourselves could have been predicted from the discontinuities that exist in the classical novel. We noted that writers of imaginative capacity were unsighted—unaware of the synchronicities with alien cultures their own narratives sought to consume—or that such writers saw but simply refused to countenance the fact that the complacent frames embodied in the traditional novel were undone by their own conceptions of fiction.

In Part Three, “The Root of Epic,” Harris celebrates the visual artist Aubrey Williams for attempting to integrate the sensibility of the Amerindian into his work with his particularly adept use of colour. However, Harris is less generous with his literary contemporary, George Lamming, whose “public voice” he regards as springing “from a verbal sophistication rather than a visual, plastic and conceptual imagery.” Harris demands of Caribbean artists that they look deep inside themselves in order that they may produce something uniquely suited to what Harris understands to be the restless, non-Western, imaginative consciousness of the region.

Part Four, “Unfinished Genesis,” reflects on the wealth of resources available for the artist to draw upon. Harris himself looks to Mayan mythology, among other systems of thought, insisting that the only way to break the stranglehold of conventional modes of narrative linearity is to open one's mind to alternative “variables within the language of the Imagination,” and submit to what he terms a “ventriloquism of spirit.” Harris is sure that conventional forms of narration not only will fail to recognize, but are also ill-equipped to transmit, a New World sensibility. However, he does recognize that there are some in the American world who have achieved a synthesis of imagination and form and created something “new,” chief among them being Faulkner.

Somewhat surprisingly, Harris does not mention the Martinican writer and theorist, Edouard Glissant, who during the course of the past forty years has developed what he terms a “Poetics of Relation,” which argues for a New World aesthetic that is similar to Harris's own. He does, however, mention the Cuban writer, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and others of a similar mindset, who provide him with some company, albeit outside of the framework of the English novel, and across the inconvenient boundary of language. But, if we can view Harris and his work in this transnational, multilinguistic, light, then his writings and themes not only make “sense,” they elevate this author to a position of global centrality. It was precisely this point that the Financial Times reviewer was trying to make some twenty-five years ago.

Andrew Bundy has done Harris a great service illuminating, and in many cases explicating, Harris's often oblique fictions by offering the reader this judicious selection of Harris's nonfiction. It is worth mentioning that it is “Linton” and not “Lynton” Kwesi Johnson, and Winsome Pinnock, not “Pollock”; these, and a few similar editorial blunders of a minor nature, ought to be corrected in future editions. This said, Bundy joins the formidable Belgian critic, Hena Maes-Jelinek, as a champion of a complex and difficult author, presenting him in a manner which will undoubtedly encourage readers to return to his fiction, this time armed with Harris's own words to help to decode the often mystifying twists and turns of this most original of literary minds.