BOOK REVIEW : Garish Morality Tale Falls Short of Model : CITY OF LIGHT: <i> by Michael Doane</i> Alfred A. Knopf, $22; 324 pages

At one point in “City of Light,” whiskey-sodden, saintly Zane, who works for an international Amnesty-style organization, is being chased through a Paris graveyard by agents of an archfiend torture doctor riding motor-scooters.

Zane tries to ride the Metro, but the scooters bounce down the steps after him. Zane makes it onto a departing subway just as the doors close, but a scooter smashes into the train and stops it. Zane flees through the tunnel on foot, but the archfiend’s men take over the train and whoosh after him.

Well, he gets away.

It has been an eventful few days for Zane. Normally, he sits quietly in the offices of ABRI (an acronym meaning shelter) and follows by computer the activities of his informants, known as “rakers,” whose perilous job it is to investigate torture on the ground in Africa. But a message comes through in Zanespak, the private code he has devised and will not share, to the intense annoyance of his slimy boss.

The message informs him that his best friend, Street, is dead. A pharmaceuticals salesman turned super-raker, Street was on the trail of Berne, who uses drugs that make tortured political prisoners forget their pain and ecstatically confess everything.

Zane throws up; then he has two whiskeys and goes to inform Street’s lover, M’Khlea. She is the beautiful but estranged wife of Okimbo, a great African poet who has become a terrorist leader in the fight against Berne and his dictator employers.

No sooner does Zane leave M’Khlea’s upper-story apartment than she comes hurtling out the window.

Zane’s apartment is smashed. He hides with Marie, who works at the bar of Chez Fingers, named for the proprietor, a 90-year-old black jazz musician. She is so ugly that her only lover has been a blind man, until Zane comes along and insists on keeping the light on.

Eventually they will marry; first Zane must pursue his pursuers. There is a clandestine meeting with Okimbo and a trip to a remote village in Mali whose inhabitants are near-blind because of a parasite-bearing insect.

Street, not dead but also near-blind--Berne’s agents had shut him in a room along with thousands of the insects--works in the fields as a live scarecrow. There is a fatal confrontation with Berne, and then a multiple happy ending.

In some respects, Michael Doane’s novel is better than all this sounds; in others, it is worse. Two side stories have a quietly odd charm. When Doane is not being torrential and globe-encompassing, he can be persuasive.

There is the relationship of Marie with her ancient employer. Fingers, a Paris fixture, wants to be buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, France’s home for eminent dead artists. You have to be eminent or French to get in. Marriage to a French citizen also qualifies, so Marie briefly and chastely marries him.

The story of Petitjean, Zane’s sidekick at ABRI, is peculiar but winning.

A onetime car thief, he is passionately self-educated and a voracious reader. He lives with a French woman and her grown, apparently retarded daughter. He and the daughter are drawn to each other; eventually, through his reading, he will discover that her problem is deafness. There is a still but beautifully complex scene in which this unstable trio spends a day at the beach; it is like a film by Eric Rohmer.

Mostly, though, “City of Light” is like a film by Oliver Stone.

Zane--he would have to be Kevin Costner--is tormentedly noble. His adventures are not just flashy; they are flashes of light in a paranoid maelstrom of powerful and corrupt political forces.

There is a suggestion that Graham Greene looms in the writer’s sights. There are the African exploits, the buzz of overhanging evil, an unsteady hero whose obstinate virtue is like a migraine. Instead of one whiskey priest, as in “The Power and the Glory,” there are two--Street and Zane.

But Doane entirely lacks Greene’s chiseled sense of proportion, his fine use of plot as the consequence of character and his ability to give his people internal as well as external life. Berne, the arch villain, is an abstract absence all the way through and a speechifying presence when finally met.

“City” is a garish morality tale; the morality is not a motor but a decor.