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Novels about Southeast Asia, wrote George Orwell, are novels about the scenery, an insight that applies to this fifth yarn by movie-writer/novelist Wood (Remo Williams. Here, the uncharted interior of Papua, New Guinea, is more than a backdrop for a diamond chase, it is also the element that transforms ordinary greed, avarice and fear into insuperable menaces when admixed with aborigine rituals. Hero Rod Murray, incorrigibly his own man, sets out from Australia to discover the reason for his brother's murder in Papua. A melange of subplots constantly recharges the narrative as do a devil's coterie of subsidiary characters, among them a Margaret Mead-type anthropologist, a criminally corrupt tycoon, a pilfering diamond cutter, an African mercenary and the Neri tribesmen, still trapped in an atavistic past and calling themselves ``the people who eat fire.'' There is a clash here between the worst of the past and the worst of the present but a recognizable virtue emerges in the denouement. (September 22) Copyright 1986 Cahners Business Information.