ROBERT Antoni was born in the US to Trinidadian parents, and was raised mostly in the Bahamas. And he is white, which is worth mentioning merely because it means he must have a good idea of what it is to be neither one thing nor the other.

William Fletcher, the main character in Carnival, is also of West Indian origin, also white, and also a writer. This means he gets the fawning attention in literary circles that 'ethnic' writers command, and then disappoints by looking European and well-to-do. This idea of racial 'legitimacy' is one of the main themes in Antoni's third novel.

Carnival is actually a fairly ambitious reimagining of The Sun Also Rises, in that it features a group of displaced young people in an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous setting. While Hemingway's characters were Americans in Europe in the 1920s, Antoni's are three Caribbeans. The protagonist, William, is a teacher and frustrated novelist living in New York who has a similar sexual confusion to Hemingway's hero, Jake Barnes.

With two of his friends, Laurence and Rachel, William returns to Trinidad for the annual carnival, an event that shares something of the exotic excess of the Pamplona bull run in The Sun Also Rises.

A sort of love triangle features here, but it is less important to the novel than the theme of identity. Laurence is Fletcher's oldest friend, a black island boy who grew up poor but went on to turn everything he did into a success. He won a scholarship to Oxford and became a tennis champion, and a successful poet-playwright. Meanwhile Fletcher is still struggling with a first novel. Laurence has married twice, to two exceptional though very different women, while William is sexually impotent, a problem that seems to have psychological roots in a violent incident in his past involving Rachel, his French-Creole second cousin and the love of his life.

These three represent a sort of 'lost tribe' of Caribbeans with no real home.

William lives in Manhattan, Laurence in London and Rachel in Nice; they assume tenure wherever they are, but they don't belong anywhere. Though they are ethnically different from each other . . . one black, one brown and one white . . . they can all be considered something opposite depending on the prejudice, and this is what they have in common.

The first section of the novel takes place in New York, and the last on the island's jungle coast. These two locations are where the important action occurs, and where the drama is focused and wellpaced. The problem with the book . . . and it's a big one, because it covers over 140 pages . . . is in the middle section, at the carnival itself, which could have done with merciless editing.

At times it's like listening to someone's long-winded account of their Caribbean holiday . . . what they ate , how many gallons of rum and Scotch and beer they drank, how many joints they smoked, how they danced, what the costumes were like, how sexually liberated everyone was. It's a relief when the carnival is over, because by the time they make the hike tocamp on the beach, you've almost forgotten what the book is supposed to be about.

The final section is intended as a detox for the characters, but instead they realise unhappily that there is no escape from prejudice of some kind, and that they don't understand their homeland any more, if they ever did. The reader, meanwhile, is left slightly hungover after a drama with no second act.