FICTION

SHAPE-SHIFTER by Pauline Melville (Pantheon Books: $18; 164 pp.) . Pauline Melville has chosen an apt title for this 12-story collection. A shape-shifter, the epigraph says, is a “shaman or medicine man of the Indians of Guiana, (who) can effect transformation of himself or others.” In several stories, the supernatural, or at least the unexplainable, intervenes directly; in all of them, people’s identities wobble, facts change their meanings and language itself fractures on the fault line between England and its Caribbean ex-colonies.

Readers of V. S. Naipaul will find themselves on familiar ground here, whether in London’s ghettoes, where blacks yearn for tropical color and warmth, or in crumbling West Indian backwaters, where they dream of lofty civilization by the Thames. But Naipaul is cool, precise and detached, while Melville--whose range of characters and dialects is remarkable--gives us an impression of untidiness and vitality.

The heritage of slavery poisons a Scottish laborer’s flirtation with a black woman he meets in a subway station. A Guyanese girl goes to a native faith healer to cure her rotting teeth. A radio storyteller inadvertently offends a dictator.

The last stories are best, as if Melville is experimenting with realism and fantasy and finally finds the right combination. There’s a comic fable about a 14-year-old girl who is terrified of infinity. There’s a chiller about a rape victim who relives her experience in harrowing detail, yet is made to doubt that it ever happened. Last of all, there’s a poetic evocation of the real shape-shifter: the cultural warp that deforms Melville’s characters every time they pass through it. And back.