Ghosts of Manila.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22, 279 pp.

This is not a novel the Philippine Tourist Office would look kindly upon. True to its title, the book leaves spirits walking abroad, a sort of haunting moral, the more eerie because of its irresolution and the more lasting because of Hamilton-Paterson's powers of language. Not many ghosts, we gather, are laid to rest in Manila--or in this fiction. Hamilton-Paterson, a British novelist and naturalist justly acclaimed for the beauty of his prose, won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel in 1989 for Gerontius. His Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island (1989), The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Threshold (1992), and his residence in both the Philippines and Italy suggest he has been thinking deeply on the relationship of East to West. Ghosts of Manila embodies those thoughts.

From the first page, the author warns us that this is not an adventure story, although by the midpoint enough plotting has been done to make the book head toward a climax. Plot indeed we have in the end, and fiery revelations, but the real sense of its structure is not so much collage as superimposition: a series of moving frames or stories running simultaneously, with an ominous center point to hold them. The first seventy pages shuttle us from an atmospheric prose poem on Manila's choking smog to a nasty little factory scene in which bodies of criminals are "salvaged" to make skeletons; a series of cuts then introduces four different stories, one involving a local police inspector, another a young, beautiful English archaeologist, the third a barrio matriarch, and finally a middle-aged English filmmaker who provides, if any character does, a narrative anchor in the tale. Each of the principals in these stories faces ghosts, spirits from the past calling if not for vengeance then for recognition. The four tales find an ironically appropriate center-point in the cesspool that Nanang Pipa, the barrio matziarch, orders dug and which, of course, releases another ghost. From this slowly spinning wheel we slide off with little sense of finality, but an extraordinary sense of life in the Philippines and of Hamilton-Paterson's art.

The novel inhabits the borderland territory so well traveled by Graham Greene--there is an intriguing tip of the hat to the old master late on in the novel. But there is also a bluntness of language in the characterization and description of violence alien to Greene. Hamilton-Paterson does many things well--his use of metaphor is particularly effective--but at times he deliberately impersonates tabloid journalists: Manila is the stuff National Enquirer vampires are made of This is not a travel book, but to those of us whose sense of the Philippines stops with Imelda Marcos's collection of shoes and Cory Aquino's yellow ribbons the novel offers revelations. The four stories pair the perspectives of European visitors facing themselves in the exotic East with those of the locals who live out the violent contradictions of an Asian nation so corruptly Westernized.

The novel wears its considerable learning lightly, offering us archaeological snippets of ancient Chinese settlement and trade, the mad history of Imelda Marcos's "edifice complex," the seedy and violent underworld of Manila, and accounts of savage antiterrorist conflicts "in the South." But it is the character John Prideaux, the filmmaker turned anthropologist, in his investigation into amok, the strange and deadly phenomenon of a person's loss of control under stress, who allows a focus of sorts. How indeed do we make sense of the public and political life in the Philippines, "high baroque in its magnificent daring," which spawns so many ghosts in its violently unjust operations? How do we, how does anyone avoid going amok?

Prideaux cannot ultimately understand the culture his anthropological designs demand he describe: the irreconcilable testimony he gathers from so many witnesses is, in a sense, the answer which Hamilton-Paterson offers us to the questions he raises about the Philippines. Prideaux comes to face himself, his own ghosts in the form of failed marriage and career, but the spirits, embodied or disembodied, of the many Filipinos he comes to know remain undiscerned, left in a world that the novelist appears to render paradigmatic--as if Manila might be what we are increasingly in New York or London. A renegade priest, Father Herrera, lashes out at Prideaux as he sifts the dregs of San Clemente, the execrable barrio which is the site for the novel's climactic scene:

The truly good couldn't care less

about being rewarded because living

well is the best revenge, but they

wouldn't mind the truly bad paid

back. Why? Not for their own self-righteous

pleasure, but because if

they aren't, the word "justice" loses

all meaning and we may as well all

go back to the jungle and stop pretending

to be civilized creatures

with souls.

The ambiguous Herrera opens a question fundamental to the novel, the justifying of the ways of God to men, or in this setting. the ways of people to people if there is a God. The spectral call for social justice, for some sort of response not so much to the hand of God or to fate but to "the hand of man which beats you to a pulp" is the preoccupation of his book. The same priest's self-sacrificial and fatal efforts to save the poor children of his flock from their burning shanty seems to commend him for his own "living well" until we find that he is no priest, indeed, is the real priest's lover. So the uncoiling of discernment winds a bit serpentine even as the climactic act of retributive justice plays out: a slum dweller goes amok and bulldozes the burning San Clemente, revealing guilty secrets and raising ghosts.

The denseness of Ghosts of Manila, the graininess of its details, its side ventures into back alleys, into a senator's country palace, and even into impossibly normal middle-class life, flesh out the more ghostly concerns. Manila lives in dialogue, incident, and in the self-discoveries of each of the principals. Although he can give no Day of Judgment to restore order, Hamilton-Paterson works a form of closure in Prideaux's airplane trip back to England: he has dismissed his research ironically as Determined Mistranslation: Myth of Intercultural Understanding and the Fiction of Interpersonal Communication and flies into occidental skies framing a prayer on behalf of the ghosts, a summons to remember the "scattered fragments of an immense collective love which once sparkled and gleamed and never quite focused itself." Where these fail, the novelist's invention hauntingly succeeds.