BOOK REVIEW : A Powerful Tale of Violated Innocence : SECRETS <i> by Kelvin Christopher James</i> , Villard Books, $2O, 197 pages

No amount of description carries us as surely into a landscape as the tang and bite of the spoken word. Kelvin Christopher James writes of his native Trinidad--its colors and smells, its heat, its rhythms--with a wealth of lush imagery and sometimes an excess. But the sense of place and history, the tragic constrictions and stubborn freedoms of a tropical-island people, come mainly through the smashed-up and glittering reinvented English he puts in their mouths.

Uxann, who begins as an awkward puppy of a girl in “Secrets,” and ends in a stony womanhood, thinks she sees a loose stave in an orchard fence on the way home from school. She waits for a moment alone to check on it. “And it was so. With a pull and a shift she had a way in.”

She lives with her father in a curious relationship that supplies the book’s tragicomic story; her pride is the meals she cooks him. In the woods, where she goes to lose and console herself, what slithers by is not a snake but a “long ‘n swallow.” And when things begin to go wrong, “the gloomy sky well fit Uxann’s mood, a half-week now glum weather had.”

Place and language are the strengths of “Secrets,” though James can lean on them too hard. Senses are explosions in the tropics. Uxann’s greediness for the flavors of food effectively represents both her character and her life, but the slurping and sloshing grow overwhelming as she engorges one spectacular bit of fruit after another, or lustily drinks milk straight from the udder. Aroused by the sight of a couple having sex, this innocent masturbates and the page itself develops an orgasm.

Later, she is pregnant and when birth pains begin after a fall in the woods, she struggles home through thickets of plants and prose.

But if James splashes a lot, he achieves quite a lot as well. It is not in the story, which is awkward and rather schematic, despite an unusual and melodramatic twist. The theme of incest is prefigured almost from the start and with only a thin veil of ambiguity; the ending is violent but oddly jaunty. Uxann emerges from the fogs of her tumultuous longings and violated innocence with a formidable calm and a hint of ancestral sorcery.

Both Uxann and Seye, her father, seem to be painted in crude, even obvious strokes, yet each gradually becomes memorable.

Seye has risen to the position of farm overseer; raising Uxann alone he is determined that she shall do well at school and rise above her village friends. But his strictness and severity are the thinnest of coverings; he is warm, discursive and incurably randy. Coming home from school each afternoon, Uxann has to brace herself for the sound of pleasured moans from his bedroom. In Seye, the man who plays and plans by the rules is continually undone by the spontaneous natural man and his moment-by-moment appetites.

Uxann, large, awkward and shy, lives to please Paps, as she calls him; making him lovely meals, doing well in school and keeping a little distance from her cheerfully unambitious schoolmates. But she is serving a divided god.

Paps hires Keah, her best friend, to do the cooking and housework so Uxann can concentrate on her studies and be a bit of a lady. Keah can’t cook, and soon Uxann has taken over again. Secretly, though--the pretense is maintained. A larger pretense is also maintained. Paps genuinely wants to spare Uxann the housework; he genuinely wants to sleep with Keah and does.

But Uxann is divided as well. A part of her is tormented by passions. She takes night-long walks in the forest, unknowingly becomes pregnant and, after a birth that destroys the family facade, commits an act of primal violence.

James’ theme of a divided national soul is not embodied merely in the plot. He implants it in each of his characters’ thoughts and acts, giving them an amiable comic richness. Uxann has been mortally betrayed by Keah and Paps; Keah remains her virtual sister, nevertheless. Paps’ decrees and prohibitions are absolute, yet he instantly undermines them.

James, who wrote several arresting and powerful short stories in his collection “Jumping Ship,” writes of a cultural geography crossed by sparsely used highways; one in which people favor the winding forest paths and, when these happen to cross a highway, get hit by a speeding truck.