FICTION

THE MURDERER by Roy Heath (Persea Books: $19.95; 190 pp.). Move “Crime and Punishment” from the slums of St. Petersburg to the slums of Georgetown, Guyana, and you’ll have something like “The Murderer.” With this difference: that the murder isn’t an existential experiment, like Raskolnikov’s, but the act of a man unable to escape his own childhood.

Long submission to his domineering mother has left Galton Flood permanently insecure, suspicious, touchy. He leaves the property he shares with his brother, flees from an attractive girl he meets in a provincial town, buries himself in the bush. When he finally marries the girl, he sets tragedy in motion. No wife could live up to the ideal of compliance his wounded pride demands--especially after he moves her into a neighborhood of thieves, whores and informers to avoid having to depend on relatives or friends.

Roy Heath (“Shadows Round the Moon”) describes a world in which the battle of the sexes underlies everything else. Women have power in the home--”I had to lock up my personality in a box to survive,” one man says--but no power outside it. After Flood kills his wife, he claims that she ran away, and the authorities don’t even bother to look.

The nemesis that stalks him--Heath’s equivalent of Dostoevski’s police inspector--is mental illness. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Flood’s mind breaks down, along the paranoid lines suggested by his earlier behavior. Heath’s rough-hewn style lends a primitive intensity to Flood’s passions, though in the end it’s not him we remember so much as the society as a whole, which shares the murderer’s arrested development, if to a lesser degree.