Guyanese fiction grappling with the dilemmas of exile and belonging is not a new development. These have been concerns of writers living overseas in the Guyanese 'diaspora' for whom identity has been an issue. In fact, these questions have received such wide and varied treatment that they have long become major themes in Caribbean literature. Yet the question of belonging within a Guyanese community and the tensions that may exist between a celebration of home and the shock of exile and placelessness have been given fairly novel treatment by one of Guyana's newest writers.

Ruel Johnson, poet and fiction-writer, has produced a collection of short stories which interrogate form and fiction themselves while exploring themes that are not new, but that are able to command the attention of readers yet again.

He experiments with the writing of fiction in a rather self-conscious manner, trying out forms in a post-modernist approach, making good use of his reading of other literatures and structuring stories by wearing a mask which is only a thin veil - the mask of a writer inspired by other writers and engaged in the working out of fictionalized accounts of experience. Established prize-winning Canadian novelist, Carol Shields, has only recently (2002), produced Unless, an excellently-crafted work of fiction about a writer writing about a writer, something that has not failed to fascinate writers.

Yet Johnson does not create a hero or a central character who is a writer and proceed with his plot in the way that Shields does; his mask is thinner than hers. He introduces the story with a preface in which the writer interrogates the subject of fiction writing the way an epic poet would appeal to his muse. Ironically, the closest model to this approach comes from a writer by whom Johnson is not consciously influenced and whom he does not even admire.

The strategy vaguely resembles the fictional autobiographies of Wilson Harris.

It is attempted in Ruel Johnson's title story, Ariadne which, unfortunately, is one of the least successful pieces in the collection. The choice of title reflects the author's intertextual interest in literature and the classics; the fictional narrative frame is interesting but the story itself is not.

It rambles. The narrative is long-winded, the plot fairly thin and the pace slow, giving the impression of a Narcissus in love with his own writing. Not only is it in need of editorial tightening, it is one of the tales in the collection that expose the limited range of experience treated by Johnson in the volume.

Yet, even here, his command of language and willingness to take on the challenges posed by craft are obvious attributes, which recommend him.

The post-modernism and fictive devices work much better in two stories that are far better than Ariadne and stand out as the most successful in the book. These are April, in which the technique is easy and inobtrusive and The Blacka in which the "fictional autobiographical" frame is skin-tight and effective.

What seems to remain in the memory of some who have read April is its high-tension sexuality. The protagonists leap into bed (or against a wall, or the kitchen table, or whenever else happens to be available) with a frequent urgency, and the heroine's friend and confidante, whose husband is away, does not even bother to need a partner. Having acquired the art of self-gratification, she proceeds with it on the nearest chair, unmindful of who might be around. She is as uninhibited in her speech, (generously decorated with appropriate four-letter words), as she is in these other areas.

Populist as all this might appear, it fits the author's literary purpose as he examines an inter-racial love affair in the context of deathly serious violence in contemporary Buxton, where there is an unholy marriage between naked crime and the cloak of political tensions.

The affair between the black Buxtonian heroine and her new East Indian boyfriend is viewed with terrified concern by her friends, acquaintances and inquisitive voyeurs, who gawk at her insanity.

Yet the threat of this very physical attachment growing into something deeply serious is as imminent as the potentially fatal physical violence that hangs over the boyfriend each time he comes to visit, loosely disguised to hide his Indian features. To be continued