Edition: U.S. / Global


By NEIL BISSOONDATH; Neil Bissoondath, a Canadian writer born in Trinidad, is the author of the forthcoming novel ''A Casual Brutality.''
Published: May 8, 1988

A THIEF IN THE VILLAGE And Other Stories. By James Berry. 148 pp. New York: Orchard Books/ Franklin Watts. $12.95. (Ages 12 and up)

This collection of short stories for teen-agers fills a gap that has existed for years in West Indian writing. When I was growing up in Trinidad in the late 1950's and 60's, in a home where books and reading were treasured, my bookshelves - and those of the local library -were crammed with tales, folk and fairy, of every land. It was a rewarding and enriching experience. But, except for the fantasy of the Anansi tales, there was nothing to reflect us children of the West Indies back to ourselves, to consider and explicate our world. Our daily life, it seemed, was too pedestrian to provide drama between hard covers. Now James Berry, in his sprightly and realistic tales of Jamaican life, proves this to be untrue.

In ''A Thief in the Village'' we meet a variety of boys and girls living lives that seem decades old in a little seaside village 74 miles from Kingston. Donkeys and horses still provide the main means of transportation, automobiles remain a curiosity and the city bus brings with it the excitement of ''a letter or some news or a visitor.'' Farm animals abound - pigs, goats, chickens, cows - and the children all have their chores to perform, even, in the title story, standing armed guard in the threatening darkness of a coconut plantation.

These are simple lives of restricted possibility, but Mr. Berry delves deep, revealing and examining the dreams and yearnings of the children - for bicycles, shoes, mouth organs - showing the importance simple things can have. In ''The Banana Tree,'' Gustus braves the terrors of a hurricane to protect the bunch of bananas he plans to sell in order to raise money to buy the shoes that will allow him to go on school trips.

Intentional or not, the book has a subtle and satisfying symmetry to it. It begins with a story of desire fulfilled (''Becky and the Wheels-and-Brake Boys'') and ends with one of desire defeated (''The Banana Tree''). Unfortunately, this structure also provides one of the few weaknesses in the book, in that ''Becky and the Wheels-and-Brake Boys'' is an inauspicious beginning, a story without cohesion that comes to a fairy-tale ending. Becky's yearning for a bicycle is fulfilled, and she learns the unfortunate lesson that she is accepted by her peers not for herself but for her possessions. It is an unusual lapse in an otherwise fine, often moving book.

On the other hand, ''Fanso and Granny-Flo,'' the tale of a boy's need to know the man who fathered him and then abandoned his mother, is the best example of Mr. Berry's talents. A probing and compassionate look at Fanso's yearning, it is a complex, moving work, with no easy answers at the end, related, like all the stories, in simple, accessible language.

This collection is not a merry romp through a tropical tourist-land. Mr. Berry, who was born in Jamaica and now lives both there and in Britain, is much too realistic a writer for that. Fathers are often dead or absent. Danger erupts from nature or rises unexpectedly in the midst of beauty. Senseless cruelty is rife. ''Elias and the Mongoose'' is an unsparing, brutal but ultimately moving tale of violence perpetrated against a retarded boy. ''Tukku-Tukku and Samson'' tells of the humiliation of a boy by other boys because ''he is dwarfed, smaller than all of us, though the same age'' and because his ''face is seldom washed clean. He sleeps on the floor, is half-starved, and has no shoes.''

Every story carries an implicit moral, none of them simple: human nature does not change (''Elias and the Mongoose''); not all dreams come true (''The Banana Tree''); people are not always what they seem (''A Thief in the Village''). But it is ''The Banana Tree'' that provides the lasting message of the book: ''The storm's bad, chil'run. Really bad. But it'll blow off. It'll spen' itself out. It'll kill itself.'' It's not a bad lesson to learn.

The stories are all told in an easy, conversational tone, enough so that they may be best appreciated if read out loud. My one reservation concerns the dialogue, which is rendered convincingly in the Jamaican dialect: ''Long-long time now . . . chil'run been frighten' o' Black Heart Man. But I nevva know one child who get tek 'way so.'' Might not the initial obscurity -there were times when even I had to re-read some lines -prove frustrating to a child unfamiliar with the accent and cadences? But this may be quibbling. It is not an insurmountable challenge, and perseverance will prove rewarding.