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...