The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers

Davenport luxuriates in the possibilities of language, the imagination's vehicle to fathom and reinvent reality. His stories--experimenting in literary form, mixing historical fact and witty banter, leaping unexpectedly into aesthetics and metaphysics--will dazzle or frustrate, depending on the reader's patience. The centerpiece of this collection, a novella titled ``Wo es war, soll ich werden'' (Freud's dictum ``Where id was, let ego be''), involves a group of raunchy youths in a Danish school who discover affection, eros and the varieties of friendship. This piece completes a trilogy begun with Davenport's earlier novels Apples and Pears and The Jules Verne Steam Balloon. The four accompanying short stories are more like vignettes than fully developed works. In the best of these, ``Colin Maillard,'' an outdoor game played by a pack of schoolboys turns to horrific violence. (Oct.)