SOURCE: Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Review of Carnival, by Wilson Harris. World Literature Today 60, no. 2 (spring 1986): 351.

In the following review, Dasenbrock asserts that Carnival is “even denser and more abstract” than Harris's previous novels, and that it is “less a narrative than a metanarrative,” noting that death is a major theme of the novel.

Wilson Harris (see WLT 58:1, pp. 19–23) has always operated at a very high level of abstraction, higher than any of his fellow West Indian novelists, higher perhaps than any other contemporary novelist in English. Even in his first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), the actual journey or quest upriver consistently gives way to more allegorical or dreamlike levels of narrative, so much so that any sorting out of the novel with an eye to “what actually happened” is utterly and deliberately impossible. Twenty-five years and many novels later in Harris's career, Carnival is even denser and...