BOOK REVIEW : The Seductive World of Paul Bowles : THE DREAM AT THE END OF THE WORLD: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier<i> by Michelle Green</i> HarperCollins $22.95 cloth, 381 pages

Michelle Green takes her title from the barroom comment of an ex-junkie to William Burroughs in 1955: “It’s the end of the world, Tangier. Don’t you feel it, Bill?”

The place may have felt like the end of the world; it was certainly an escape from the world. Green describes post-World War II Tangier as a “deliciously depraved version of Eden.” Homosexuality was accepted; you could get hashish anywhere and you could buy opium over the counter at your local pharmacy. A far cry from Eisenhower’s America.

Green strings her clear-eyed, intelligent and exceedingly readable chronicle on the life of Paul Bowles, particularly the years 1947 to 1954. Bowles became famous as the author of “The Sheltering Sky,” a best seller in 1947 and a Bernardo Bertolucci movie in 1990.

“The Sheltering Sky,” to put it very mildly, is not a comic novel. Its famously terrifying death scene, we learn from Green, was written when Bowles was under the influence of majoun , cannabis mixed with honey and herbs.

But this place and this cast cry out for a comic novel. The pathos of the social climbers and the socially climbed, and those who have completely given up climbing and almost given up existing, requires some sun-tanned, partly doped-up Evelyn Waugh. Lacking a comic novel about Tangier, this graceful work of nonfiction will do.

Post-World War II Tangier enjoyed a quirky international status. Marketing was done in French francs and Spanish pesetas. Every corner had mail boxes for Spanish, British and Moroccan postal systems. It was hard to be disreputable enough to be refused entry to Tangier; criminals, ex-Nazis and deeply shady financiers found a haven.

The cast of visitors to and settlers in Tangier includes Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, British painter Francis Bacon, many assorted dissolute British and various flamboyant socialites. Capote considered the “squalid caravan” of expatriates “among the planet’s most pathetic tribes. . . .”

One of the surprises of Green’s book is how articulate William Burroughs was, though in the depths of his heroin addiction during a good part of his four-year stay. At one point he wrote, he “had not taken a bath . . . nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous gray wooden flesh of terminal addiction.”

Green, senior writer for People magazine, does not neglect the “shimmering evenings” of what, for want of a precise term, is called “the international set.” Hutton, who was working her way through the $28 million she inherited, dominated the Tangier social scene, entertaining Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert and some people without alliterative names, including Aristotle Onassis.

Daily social life was highlighted by dramatic fallings-out among people who were falling apart. In fact, Bowles was one of the few outsiders who went to Tangier and didn’t fall apart. He wrote, “Tangier doesn’t make a man disintegrate, but it does attract people who are going to disintegrate anyway.”

The place was a disaster for Bowles’ wife, Jane, talented and depressed. She had published a critically acclaimed novel and written a Broadway play before going to Tangier; in her 20 years there she finished two short stories. Paul loved his wife, in his fashion. Her mind, he said, “could have been invented by Kafka,” a comment which could be taken as admiring.

Their tastes set them apart. She drank, he smoked the marijuana-and-tobacco combo called kif . He had affairs with men, she with women. She sought out a series of unlikable lovers like Cherifa, a Moroccan woman who carried a switchblade, cast spells and demanded a Mercedes (she ended up settling for a radio) before she’d go to Jane’s house.

Jane might have the last word on the expatriate colony in Tangier. “I should really be in East Hampton,” she wrote a friend, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She died in a Malaga sanatorium after five years in Spanish psychiatric hospitals.

Paul Bowles, 80, is still living in Tangier. The beautiful jacket design by Lynn Dreese Breslin captures him in amber. Framed by a Moroccan print, Bowles reclines on green and red silk, a slim male odalisque with his signature black holder for kif cigarettes. He is stylish, seductive and frightening.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “‘Waiting for the Weekend” by Witold Rybczynski (Viking).