SOURCE: McLeod, A. L. Review of The Infinite Rehearsal, by Wilson Harris. World Literature Today 62, no. 3 (summer 1988): 498–99.

In the following positive review, McLeod describes The Infinite Rehearsal as an apparently simple yet deeply profound novella, asserting that it is “an allegorical political parable” that explores “the universal imagination.”

Like Melville, Tolstoy, and Steinbeck, Wilson Harris has chosen the novella form for [The Infinite Rehearsal] one of his most profound yet apparently simple fictions. In the form of a fictional autobiography by Robin Redbreast Glass, Harris has written (in prose that at times becomes so surrealist as to verge on the opaque) an allegorical political parable concerning “the ceaseless rehearsal of the play of truth”—or “an infinite rehearsal of a play of the birth of history.” His concern is with the universal imagination and the essential nature of the spirit and of value.

Throughout his poetry, fictions, and...