BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Provocative Musings Amid Stories of Justice, Oppression : GHOSTS OF MANILA <i> by James Hamilton-Paterson</i> ; Farrar, Straus, Giroux $22, 279 pages

There are nine circles in Dante’s hell. There are 7,000 islands in James Hamilton-Paterson’s, otherwise known as the Philippines. The Virgil who leads us through this Third World inferno is an English anthropologist, John Prideaux, whose unacademic thesis on the cultural origins of moral and mental breakdown--”running amok”--turns out to be the novel we are reading.

Prideaux, a former documentary filmmaker who honed his sense of irony, futility and unredeemed injustice during the Vietnam War, is one of his own characters. The others are the people he interviews: two priests, a police inspector, an American archeologist, her Filipina lover and her English assistant, a reporter, a senator, a woman who organizes a sewing cooperative in the slums and a diseased ex-soldier called “the Rotting Man.”

Hamilton-Paterson (“Playing With Water,” “Griefwork”) avails himself of all the novelist’s usual privileges. He lets Prideaux intuit or invent the inner lives of the other characters, at least as vividly as he describes his own. Their stories, at first separate strands, weave together into a plot.

Still, “Ghosts of Manila” is a lumpy novel. It contains large, half-digested chunks of sociology, history, journalism, folklore, travelogue, religion and philosophy. It is, just as Prideaux claims, a thesis, and its subject is the “general alp of disaster which nowadays towered on everyone’s doorstep.”

In the Philippines, the woes of the world at large are exacerbated by baroque complexities of violence and corruption. To Vic Agusan, the reporter, “everything else flowed from these simple facts . . . 80% of the people were landless laborers, small farmers and workers living below the poverty line, while between 80% and 90% of the members of (Congress) were millionaires.”

The result is a nation haunted by “ghosts”: Children kidnaped for the sex trade. Workers entombed in the concrete of buildings that Imelda Marcos rushed to completion. Gangsters and rebels murdered by police death squads, sealed in oil drums and delivered to a factory where diligent craftsmen reduce them to skeletons and sell them to medical schools around the world.

Ysabella Bastiaan, the archeologist’s assistant, “couldn’t decide if all this was the sign of an extremely backward society which had yet to fix the essential nouns of its being so that everyone understood the same thing by law, honesty, public service, police, elections and so on, or whether it was actually a preview of a sophisticated futuristic state likely to hold sway everywhere sometime soon.”

Hamilton-Paterson seems to favor the latter theory. His aim isn’t to slander the Philippines in particular. Like American novelist Richard Powers (“Operation Wandering Soul”), he believes that life is bound to paralyze with horror any person intelligent and compassionate enough to see it clearly. Manila, simply, is a place that strips off our blinders.

Moreover, Prideaux and Bastiaan come to realize, what right do post-Colonial Westerners have to judge another society when they can’t fathom their own motives? An observer alters whatever is observed: The archeologist, Sharon Polick, is partly responsible for displacing a community of hundreds of squatters when she finds ancient Chinese ceramics in a newly dug latrine.

Morality and the hunger for justice, the priests point out, are alive and well in the Third World. But they have mutated into strange forms. Where every fortune (including that of the senator, who started as a driver for Bastiaan’s ambassador father) is tainted and most judges can be bribed, even decent cops like Inspector Gregorio Dingca wink at the death squads, which ensure that at least some middle-level criminals are punished. (The biggest crooks, of course, are untouchable.)

For a novel that is so much of an intellectual construct, “Ghosts of Manila” is remarkably alive. Hamilton-Paterson crams it with gaudy prose, lurid and hyper-exact detail, outrageous stories (many undoubtedly true) and humor. If his English characters are burned-out and vague, his Americans are better and his Filipinos--Agusan, Dingca and the slum entrepreneur, Epifania Tugos--better yet. The Op-Ed musings are provocative, but not so loud that we can’t hear the cries of the victims.