The West Indies is surely one of the places the English novel may look to for plasma: to Andrew Salkey, Garth St Omer, Peter Marshall, and the wildly poetic Wilson Harris, who writes in Ascent to Omai like an academic on an acid trip. Europe, Africa, the East, and the new world; a reference to Odin's ravens followed by one about Julius Reuter's pigeons—here is a writer from Guyana, a culture that is part old Europe, part the mysterious Zen East, and part slave-dark Africa, and somehow he is able to encompass it all, be aware of it all and use it. But he is difficult. The reader can't keep up, catch the wild use of language, the dreamy slides and slips of plot from present to past, the use of omens (what are omens to us but a cliché word of political reporters?), omens used as...