BOOK REVIEW : Moving Tale of Life in Colonized Guyana : FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY, by Roy Heath , Persea Books $19.95; 159 pages

There is not a single reference to colonialism in “From the Heat of the Day,” nor is there any mention of Great Britain. Yet Roy Heath’s novel, set in the 1920s, is as surely about the stagnation of a colonized society as Gogol’s stories were about stagnant 19th-Century Russia. There is a dam downstream, and what we get is the lazy eddying of lives without current or egress.

A muddy strip of coast with a jungle hinterland, British Guiana--now Guyana--was never a jewel of empire. Compared to Jamaica, Trinidad or even Barbados, it was a backwater. British companies cultivated sugar, using labor brought in from India, but there was not really a white plantation class, nor was the place any kind of plum for colonial officials.

Except at the top levels, the administration was mainly in the hands of the black population, which formed something of a threadbare middle class; its status furnished partly by its function and partly by its superiority to the East Indian cane-cutters. The successful settled in the frail wood-frame gentility of the Queenstown section of Georgetown. Roy Heath, a Guyanese living in London, writes of the frailty of the society that lived in the wooden houses.

“Heat” is about the marriage of Sonny Armstrong, son of a village wheelwright, to Gladys Davis, whose family lives in Queenstown, owns a piano and uses “serviettes” at dinner. Sonny takes her to live on the outskirts of town, where brackish green-slimed trenches run between the houses and drinking water comes from rain barrels. Gladys’ family is mildly patronizing with Sonny, even after he works his way up in the postal service and is able to move into Queenstown.

The marriage decays over the years. Sonny is a mixture of baffled tenderness and belligerent yearning. He loves Gladys but drifts away from her, plans to find a mistress and has sex with the maid. Gladys lives in a state of dreamy frustration and suffers from loneliness. Her only confidante is the maid her husband sleeps with. When their two children are in their teens, she falls ill and dies. Sonny ends up jobless, conscience-stricken and alone.

What is distinctive about “Heat” is not the story but the way it is told. The material might suggest a social and family epic, a John Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett novel of the Caribbean. Heath writes a floating account instead, almost an allegory. It is a handful of scenes spanning 15 or 20 years and almost entirely without connective material. It has the quality of one of the visions that Sonny is afflicted with from time to time.

The account of Sonny’s and Gladys’ lives provides, on the surface, a fairly routine mixture of personal and social tragicomedy. But Heath has infused it with a strange indeterminacy. The characters live tentative lives and experience tentative passions.

Gladys, brought up strict--on her wedding night, “she duly delivered up her virginity on the tray of propriety, the consummation of a blameless girlhood”--is consumed by the fantasy of rape by “an ugly man.” Sonny is erratically lustful and indifferent. He nurses his own fantasy of finding a mistress but never really tries. The maid submits to his overtures, rejects them, welcomes him back and finally leaves to live with her boyfriend.

Everything flows one way, reverses and then reverses again. Gladys’ father despises Sonny’s low-class background but nevertheless welcomes him affably into the family, while still looking down on him. Definite actions turn vague; one thing leads not to another but, more often, around in a circle.

It is the dammed current. Impatient as we may become with the story’s wavering, with the subsiding of its tensions into anticlimaxes or forgetfulness, we realize bit by bit what Heath is accomplishing.

The story of the Armstrong family is undermined by its setting. The middle-class story of marriage, of social ambition and advancement, of adultery and remorse, has no foundation. The genteel black middle class of British Guiana is a simulacrum. It is the imitation of a class; it occupies its position without owning it. When the Depression causes the invisible English to curtail their colonial appropriations halfway around the world, Sonny’s postmastership is eliminated.

Heath’s style flows, ebbs and loses itself. He moves us and strands us. His prose is almost deliberately banal as he “tells” the main lines of Sonny’s and Gladys’ story. It flowers in odd moonlit scenes: the couple walking on the beach, or a maid moving quietly in the kitchen after an all-night party, picking up Gladys’ crying baby and nursing it at her milkless pubescent breast. Sonny and Gladys are living the wrong novel; they dream, sometimes, the right one.