SOURCE: Burnett, Paula. “Apocalypse Now and Then.” New Statesman 125, no. 4292 (12 July 1996): 48.

In the following review, Burnett offers a positive assessment of Jonestown, calling the novel a “mind-altering experience.”

Reading Wilson Harris is like staring into the luminous, fluid palaces at the heart of a log fire. Those addicted to push-button heating don't know what they're missing. But, like a log fire, you may need patience to get it going. Harris, a Guyanese novelist who was writing magic realism before the term was invented, puts it down to the influence of the rainforest on him as a young surveyor: “There was this peculiar density, depth, and transparency in the rainforest … One thing would correspond with another in startling ways.”

After that, for the writer in him, “language began to bend, to shape itself.” He deplores realism as blind to the “parallel universes of the Imagination,” and post-modernism as having...