BOOK REVIEW : Micronesian Politics Spill Over Edge : THE EDGE OF PARADISE America in Micronesia <i> by P.F. Kluge</i> Random House, $21.95, 256 pages

“If you dream of islands, dream of them at dawn,” advises P.F. Kluge in “The Edge of Paradise.”

“Dream of them when they are cool and hushed, before heat and light chase the dream away.”

The first beguiling phrases of Kluge’s reverie on the South Pacific are a warning. In “The Edge of Paradise,” Kluge gives us an oblique, almost impressionistic account of the history and politics of Micronesia, the vast archipelago of the South Pacific where American-style pork-barrel democracy (or, at least, American-style consumerism) took root in soil bloodied by the island-hopping campaigns of World War II.

Closer to the heart of the work, however, are Kluge’s achingly intimate memories of his own Micronesian experience.

He first saw the islands while an idealistic young Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. Later, he signed on as a speech writer and political utility man for a charismatic Palawan politician named Lazarus Salii. (The Jeffersonian scribe of the Micronesian independence movement, Kluge wrote the preamble of an early Micronesian constitution.) Even after he returned to the United States to work as a business reporter and then a novelist, Kluge was obsessed by memories of Micronesia. And it was Salii’s suicide in 1988 that drew him back to the islands.

“We won’t forget you,” Salii had promised Kluge.

“Who remembers the name of Paul Revere’s horse?” Kluge replied.

“Paul Revere did,” quipped Salii.

Kluge, a man haunted by history, is at large in a place with a resonant history of its own. The very place names are deeply evocative for any reader who remembers World War II: Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu. And Kluge confirms that the war is a persistent ghost. Japanese tourists still come to the South Pacific to collect the bones of their fallen ancestors from long-abandoned bunkers and sunken warships. Kluge himself, a poet and an adventurer with a firm grasp on history, describes how he happened across the airfield where the Enola Gay was armed and dispatched to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Sensing I’ve come far enough, I turn left into a lateral tunnel, which might take me where I want to go or, then again, someplace I’ve never been--an antiaircraft gun, a Japanese bunker, a shot-down plane,” he writes. “Then: daylight, space, eternity . . . the high-water mark of American power--August 6, 1945.”

But Kluge witnessed what came after the war, when the victorious United States--”the uncola of colonial powers”--tried to figure out exactly what to do with these islands. As he reminds us, a few of them were literally obliterated by the test-firings of thermonuclear bombs. At least one island republic later offered to turn its atolls into garbage dumps for the benefit of American consumers. “A sleazeball garrison island, a B-grade back-door California” is what Guam became, Kluge tells us, and what the rest of the islands are in danger of becoming.

“Does it strike you as shrewd, filling up Pacific lagoons with Pampers and paint cans from Seattle?” Kluge muses. “Does it smell like money to you?”

So Kluge bemoans the classic despoliation of an idyllic place by the happy face and voracious maw of American civilization--”Paradise ends where people begin,” he mutters--but he reminds us, too, that the West worked its will on the islands in other, less showy ways.

Kluge gives us a series of characters and scenes right out of a Graham Greene novel: shadowy Americans in colonial backwaters who may or may not be CIA agents; a former Luftwaffe pilot who “found religion” and runs a medical air service in the South Pacific, and Salii himself, whose apparent suicide was reputed to be a cover-up. There’s a novel in here somewhere, one suspects.

Indeed, Kluge himself is not entirely sure what he wants “The Edge of Paradise” to be. At times, it’s a book about the hothouse politics of the South Pacific. Sometimes it’s a savvy travel book about exotic destinations. The publisher categorizes it under “Current Affairs.”

But, at heart, “The Edge of Paradise” is a story about, as Kluge himself puts it, “memory and integrity and faith”--it’s a confession, an odyssey, a dream that threatens to turn into a nightmare.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Learning to Look” by Sir John Pope-Hennessy (Doubleday).