The Whitewashing of the Valdez Oil Cleanup : OUT OF THE CHANNEL; The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, <i> By John Keeble</i> ; Harper Collins; $22.95, 272 pages

It has been said there are only two themes for all the stories in the world: A stranger rides into town, or a friend goes on a journey. An ambitious, accomplished account of how Exxon mismanaged the Valdez oil spill cleanup, John Keeble’s “Out of the Channel” is a rare fusion of both themes.

The stranger, of course, is Exxon, which rode into the small fishing communities of Valdez, Cordova and Port Graham, fragmenting and changing them profoundly. The friend is Keeble himself, who takes us on an awed, marveling journey through the world’s “channels,” currents of power that enable corporations to skillfully dodge responsibility.

The nearly 1,200 Alaskans interviewed by Keeble do not seem to have much of a stomach for these bureaucratic machinations; they came to the frontier, after all, in flight from more traditional, bordered, urban ways. Caught in a net of glossy lies and suppressed information (kept secret by Exxon for use in upcoming, private lawsuits), the residents respond to the spill with tears and nausea.

Nevertheless, Keeble and many of the cleanup volunteers learn to take solace, in a wonderful, Old Testament sort of way, from the solemn discovery that we are all “spiritually accountable.” His novelist’s eye searches steadily for small bright spots of courage and determination to counterbalance the evasion and environmental devastation.

The money that Exxon dumped into the affected communities had the unforeseen effect of turning neighbor against neighbor, for the company’s hiring was highly selective. “Exxon now was offering $3,500 and more a day for leases on boats from Cordova’s fleet,” Keeble explains, “but the contract came equipped with a gag clause. Fishermen were not to express their opinions to the press.”

Volunteer Kelly Weaverling (who, Keeble writes, quite possibly knew the sound better than anyone) was ordered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials to stop rescuing oiled otters because “his fleet was unauthorized, untrained, and had been operating without inspections.”

“I’m unaffiliated,” Weaverling tells Keeble. “I’m an independent voter. I came here to get away from society.”

While the volunteers were offended, the scientists were awe-struck. Touring one beach recently “cleaned up” with a “hot wash,” Keeble and one biologist suddenly notice that as they step across the sand, dark clouds begin rising from the bottom and swirling around their boots.

“I stepped again and raised another cloud,” Keeble writes. “I turned back and dug through the sand with a stick, creating a small hole about four inches deep. Quickly, the bottom of the hole filled with oil. I dug another hole in the beach, and another. . . . Each time, the black oil seeped into the bottom and rose to its level a couple of inches beneath the surface.”

What particularly strikes Keeble as he travels between Alaska and the Lower 48 is the discrepancy between what he sees and what is reported. He documents Exxon’s easy manipulation of the media, such as the event at Gore Point where “a USA Today production crew filmed cleanup efforts . . . for national broadcast.

Two hours before the production team arrived, as many as 53 workers were shuttled to a Gore Point beach and then filmed as they industriously mopped and shoveled the heavy oil. After the production crew left, the workers were shuttled back out. The next day 40 of them were laid off.”

Another problem was that dying creatures rarely posed for the cameras. They only could be found, Keeble writes, by “picking one’s way among oil-inundated rocks. . . . I felt through the touch of a footfall upon something too hard to be liquid and too soft to be rock a pliant thing down there, too solid to be wood or stone, a thing that still had the give of what had been a life and the integrity of lineament, skin and bone, a thing that slithered away from the boot and when punctured gave off gas. The smell of rot mixed with the smell of raw petroleum.”

Because Keeble confronts Exxon’s deceptions with childlike wonder rather than hardened rancor, we leave this book with the hopeful feeling that a new start might still be possible.

At the same time, he comes to the obvious and logical discovery that America is Exxon. Even if we ask for them, we might not be able to get cars powered by electricity and natural gas or new tax levies to discourage the use of fossil fuels. It’s hard for ordinary folks to influence the will of giants, as the Alaskan salmon-fishing villages discovered.

But the fact remains that we aren’t asking for these things. Thus, while the blame for environmental destruction might begin on Bligh Reef, with the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, it will not exclude us unless we make an effort to look beyond the superficial TV coverage and ponder the disturbing truths revealed in these pages.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Deadline: A Memoir,” by James Reston (Random House).