The Law of the Land : WHITE MAN’S GRAVE, <i> By Richard Dooling (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22; 386 pp.)</i>

Richard Dooling is a traveler in two drastically different territories: the law he practices today in Nebraska, and the folkways of the Mende people in the backlands of Sierra Leone, where he once stayed.

In his sardonic and decidedly untidy novel, “White Man’s Grave,” he pits the tribal magic of each against the other. There is no question who wins. Dooling has something of the beady, comical glitter of Evelyn Waugh--though not his formal perfection--but only in one eye. Waugh traveled in Sierra Leone and wrote nastily about both whites and blacks. Dooling’s parody wickedly impales his Americans; his ingenious sympathies lie with the Mende villagers, giving his book an aspect beyond parody.

The story goes roughly like this: Randall Killigan, a maniacally hard-charging lawyer in Indianapolis, has a straying son, Michael, who went to Africa with the Peace Corps for two years, stayed for four and has disappeared. While Randall fulminates, mobilizes his senator and the State Department and offers large rewards, a second effort goes on. Boone, an artist friend of Michael’s and a fugitive from an equivalent bull-elephant of a father, treks into the Sierra Leone bush. Eventually Michael turns up along with an explanation for his disappearance.

Most of the African part of the story, which is most of the book, concerns Boone’s painful and illuminating encounters with a primitive village civilization. Painful for him, illuminating for us. The young man’s artistic veneer quickly burns off, disclosing a hereditary, stiff-necked American prig. The priggishness, though, allows the author to show us what Boone refuses to see: how supremely and winningly, in the notion of primitive civilization, the noun demolishes the adjective.

Dooling gives us a bravura display of satire with Randall Killigan, in war paint and tribal regalia, as a legal chieftain whose ambition is to be “the synonym for bankruptcy in the Seventh Circuit.” He demolishes the lawyers for bankrupt firms. He lays the reeking carcasses of his victims upon his conference-room table, apportioning bits to the rival creditors’ lawyers. He is the most virile tiger in the jungle: the electronic notebook he carries into negotiating battle has twice as many bytes as anyone else’s. It contains for instant reference the entire Federal Bankruptcy Code, annotated.

The imagery, of course, is purposeful as well as comic. As the search for his son goes on, with Boone encountering witches, shape-changers, juju medicine, the dumbstruck regard of young villagers and the cryptic though essentially benevolent maneuvering of the elders, Africa leaks into Indianapolis. Randall mysteriously receives a hideous, skin-wrapped package that drips blood; now and then it turns into a bat. For a while he wonders if he has a brain tumor; gradually he realizes that it is witchcraft.

It will turn out to be self-inflicted: he, we will learn by the end, is possessed by a witch-spirit and has, in effect, become one. As one character points out, the American counterpart of voodoo is lawsuits: Both are used to kill, sicken or otherwise ruin ones neighbors. The Mende hire witches, we hire lawyers. Dooling brings off his satiric parallel, which might otherwise seem forced, with a wit and outrageousness that make it work.

His success has large holes in it, though. He can satirize his countrymen but he is plain awful when he attempts anything more inward with them. When Randall goes to Mass and Confession to try to stave off the witchery, his mental flailing is written in flamboyant cliche and interlarded with more cliche: lengthy quotations from the liturgy. Satire has sunk out of its depth to become the mawkish thing it satirizes.

In the African chapters, the author’s sympathy and responsiveness produce writing whose humor is carried on a current of discovery and astonishment. Only the Americans are flat. Michael, when discovered, is simply an American over-achiever gone native. Boone’s cultural obtuseness has a narrative usefulness--it allows the delicate complexities of the villagers to emerge more clearly--but it turns him into a null character. An anthropologist who has lived with the Mende for years and has, in effect, become one of them, is considerably less interesting than what he has to say. He is a good explainer but not much else. Oddly, the only American with any roundness or allure is a thoroughly reprehensible Peace Corps veteran, infinitely cynical about the villagers and mainly in it for the adventure and the beer.

He is alive, though, and authentic. And it is in evoking the life of Africa and in suggesting the wisdom and forbearance that underlay the “superstitions” of the Mende villagers that Dooling is at his best. There is, first of all, a vivid presentation not just of what his Africa looks, feels and smells like, but of the emotions of unease and beguilement they can produce. The vast landscape seen from the descending airplane looks like “an empire of solid broccoli tops stretching inland to the horizon.” Boone rides a rickety truck into the interior; people, animals and cargo are so jammed together that the passengers practice a kind of metabolism-lowering trance state.

The villagers live in a fearful world of uncontrollable events: hunger, disease, the depredations of white settlers and diamond seekers, and the arbitrary incursions of warring political factions whose maneuvering in the capital is felt 200 miles down-country. Dooling portrays the rich culture that can evolve from powerlessness to command ones environment; as opposed to Western culture, which has evolved from just the opposite. From command, that is, or a sense of command or--look at our cities--an illusion of command.

The suggestion is there without being explicit. It is fleshed out in countless scenes in which Dooling gives life to a village that manages dignity and a subversive humor in the teeth of what seem to us like invincible odds. The witchcraft, the magical secret societies, the shamanism, the taboos are ways of coping with unmanageable dangers both outside and within. In his portraits--a visiting witch-cleaner who runs a cotton thread around the village so nobody shall leave or enter until the place is cleaned; the poignantly striving third wife of a local political thug; and above all, the elder who adopts Boone as his son so that the villagers can see him as a real person, albeit an odd and misbehaving one--Dooling evokes the humane checks and balances of a deep world; the logic, you might say, of its magic.