The Arts on Sunday commented on Ruel Johnson's first collection of short stories, Ariadne and Other Stories, when it was a manuscript shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Fiction 2002. Much has happened since then. The manuscript won for its author, the Best First Book Prize for Fiction, and this must have inspired Johnson to publish it himself amidst continued cries that the Guyana Prize Management Council should take the responsibility of publishing works like these. The book is now available in paperback in at least two countries, since it was also launched in Trinidad and Tobago. Two companies assisted the author: Guyenterprise and Courts are to be duly thanked for stepping in to allow a bright new talent to be exposed to a wider readership and to reduce the validity of complaints from readers in Guyana that the prize- winning works of these Guyanese writers are often unavailable in their own country.

This support from the private sector is even more encouraging in a climate where funding for the arts is not easy to come by. But while we celebrate Johnson's good fortune, a remark by Jane Bryce reminds us that there is another very important side to this. Dr Bryce, a former Guyana Prize Judge, is a writer and critic who runs one of the creative writing programmes at UWI. While admiring Johnson's talent, she finds that a certain lack of maturity is evident in his work, an observation that I can relate to. The point here is that, while the book is out and delighting readers, being self-published was not the best thing for its author. If he had sent it to a publishing firm and they happened to be interested, he might have benefited enormously from the intervention of a good editor. But he is such an obvious talent that none can begrudge him publication, circulation and wide readership.

Ruel Johnson grew up in Tucville, one of the 'housing schemes' of Greater Georgetown, and got a good secondary education at President's College, where he must have done quite well. He completed sixth form and 'A' Levels, apparently acquiring a fascination for reading, languages and creative writing. He is also a poet of some note; his first collection of poems, The Enormous Night, was also shortlisted for the Guyana Prize 2002. He brings something from this background to his fiction, giving fairly novel treatment to questions of belonging within a Guyanese community and the tensions that may exist between a celebration of home and the shock of exile and placelessness.

He 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 Johnson's title story, Ariadne which, unfortunately, is not one of the most 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.

The most obvious element of April is its high-tension sexuality. The protagonists leap into bed (or against a wall, or the kitchen table, or wherever 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 racial 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 friend and any inquisitive voyeur, who would gawk at her insanity. Yet the threat of this very physical attachment growing into something deeply serious is as imminent as the fatal physical violence that hangs over the boyfriend each time he comes to visit, loosely disguised to hide his Indian features. When the inevitable happens and his cover is blown, he is, as expected, confronted on the street by a small army of black men. But the story rises above a predictable ending, its deliberate mystery leaving the readers with a range of possible explanations. What is obvious, is that Johnson intends to challenge the 'accepted;' his plot defeats the 'normal' position that this inter-racial union is abnormal madness, forcing the audience to rethink taught values.

Strange as it might appear, this recounted memory of the Lamaha Canal behind Tucville on the fringes of Georgetown, is a celebration of the land. As happens in any fiction, it is supposed to immortalize that local phenomenon known as 'the blacka.' This is evident in the narrator's 'introduction' and in the pastoral reverence with which he describes the frolic of the young boys, united in their innocence, in and around the canal during primary-school days. Yet time and change have disarranged that idyll. After his triumphant completion of sixth form and 'A' levels, the narrator is a misfit in Tucville and ends up not even wanting to visit it again. The community has certainly changed, but it is not too clear whether him or his erstwhile friends, have remained stagnant in time.

The 'friends' are obviously heading along different paths and he relates their eventual destinations, one in prison, another in AIDS, with a mixture of tragedy and a sense of the expected. At the same time, the narrator is a misfit at the other end of the social ladder. His more affluent middle-class President's College schoolmates can no longer accommodate a Tucville boy as a friend outside of the school environment.

Johnson manages to touch on the paradox of exile and alienation, not among writers living overseas, but among those like him, isolated in his own home. His stories are rendered better for the intimations of alienation that they reflect. It is this underlying consciousness of a certain disturbing placelessness that lends some power to a collection that is otherwise affected by a somewhat limited range of experience and a self-conscious literariness. It is that, coupled with the author's readiness to challenge, his interest in craft and his ability to experiment with it sensibly, that make Ariadne and Other Stories a good first collection.