By PETER APPLEBOME

GOD OF THE RODEO

The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison.

By Daniel Bergner.

295 pp. New York:

Crown Publishers. $24.



t's no accident that the South's prisons are some of its most mythic, darkly resonant places. There is the Walls Unit prison in Huntsville, Tex., the execution capital of America, where people still speak fondly of ''Old Sparky,'' the electric chair that was finally put out to pasture when lethal injection was adopted in 1977. There is the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, as much an inspiration for classic blues as cheap liquor or busted love. And there is Angola, La., where the winding two-lane road to nowhere ends in an utterly isolated purgatory for society's outcasts, bordered on three sides by the levees of the Mississippi and on the fourth by a dense no man's land of vines, undergrowth and snakes so daunting there's no need for a fence.

Angola covers 18,000 acres, larger than the island of Manhattan. Because of Louisiana's unusually stringent sentencing laws, about 80 percent of Angola's inmates -- mostly murderers, rapists and armed robbers -- have no-parole sentences or sentences so long they might as well be. It's impossible to visit the place and not feel that a prisoner could disappear off the face of the earth and no one would ever know or care.

Daniel Bergner, a New York-based journalist and novelist, gives voice to the forgotten in ''God of the Rodeo,'' a vivid, ambitious (sometimes too ambitious) and ferociously reported book that reads like a novel. Bergner tells us he was looking for both a story and something close to a revelation -- an affirmation of what he describes as his own tenuous faith in God. He finds more than one story -- chilling and heartbreaking tales of violence, penance and sometimes redemption. But the personal revelation is harder to come by. The closer the book sticks to hard-edged reporting the better it is. When it strays into a search for the transcendent, it runs the risk of strained overreaching.

Bergner's book grew out of reporting he did for Harper's Magazine on Angola's annual prison rodeo, where inmates, many of them with as much background in rodeo as they have in quantum mechanics, risk their lives each fall in a gaudy, gladiatorial spectacle. Bergner uses the rodeo contestants as a window into Angola, a way to make sense of the people who find their way there. In doing so, he faced numerous inherent risks, most of which he handled with skill and insight. The prison rodeo is one of those stories that are at once wildly exotic and perhaps overly familiar, and it's not unique to Angola. (Huntsville had an even more famous rodeo until it was phased out in 1988.) The utter desolation of the prisoners' lives and the barbarity of their surroundings can lead a sympathetic observer to forget why the prisoners are there. And the Old South plantation vapors and inescapable racial context (77 percent of the inmates are black, two-thirds of the guards are white, as is all the top leadership) make a place like Angola a lightning rod for every stereotypical view of the South.

To his credit, Bergner navigates those hazards with admirable dexterity and sophistication. Even people who know something about prison rodeos will find it hard not to be caught up in the richly etched lives he discovers behind the ghoulish pageantry of events like ''convict poker,'' in which four inmates sit in folding chairs around a bright red table as a 2,000-pound bull is let loose in the arena. The last one sitting wins $100. And Bergner is no censorious Yankee naif adrift in the South. He has a nuanced, probing take on almost everything he encounters, right down to the rodeo itself. And while he deals with the prisoners as real individuals with the capacity to grow and sometimes reform, he takes pains to remind us that most are in Angola for the kind of unspeakable crimes that deserve exile from what passes for a civilized society.

''God of the Rodeo'' is really three books. The first and best is riveting reportage on prison life that uses the rodeo as both gateway and metaphor for life at Angola. The second is Bergner's uneasy, increasingly contentious dance with Angola's warden, Burl Cain, who in the course of the narrative goes from being the soul of Christian charity to a grasping shakedown artist. And the final one is a spiritual journey trying to extract meaning from the dark tales playing out inside Angola.

Bergner is a terrific reporter with a novelist's eye. When we first meet Cain, he's entering the rodeo arena in the closest thing he can find to a chariot -- ''a wooden cart, lacquered and polished, with big white-spoked wheels, pulled by his inmate-tended team of Percheron horses.'' When we first meet a prisoner named Littell Harris, we're given a snapshot of him mixing a cocktail of his own feces, mashed and stirred to a consistency useful for dousing an offending fellow inmate through a bottle with a squirt top. We learn how to make a prison tattoo, first burning a plastic canister, usually of Speed Stick, then mixing the soot with toothpaste and water to make the ink. Then a steel guitar string is threaded through an empty pen shaft and hooked up to a tiny motor (taken from a cassette player) and jabbed thousands of times into the skin.

Sometimes you wonder if the reporting is a bit too vivid. Bergner and his publisher sought jacket blurbs with unusual aggressiveness from the best-selling authors of what at the moment seems to go by the name of literary non-fiction, like Sebastian Junger and John Berendt. And while there's no reason to think that Bergner emulated Berendt, who has acknowledged that he invented dialogue in ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,'' one wishes that Bergner had provided a note on his methodology. When he recounts both sides of a phone conversation, did he tape the call or rely on a prisoner's reconstruction? And if, as is evident, he reconstructed a scene with Littell Harris and a woman in a motel room after Harris was released from prison, did he reconstruct others as well? Bergner clearly did exhaustive reporting and expended enormous energy to get his story. But the rules of what's real and what's massaged are so murky in nonfiction these days it would have been helpful to know just how to take the reporting, especially since nearly all the principals in the book are lost in Angola's time warp.

Bergner's depiction of his relationship with Cain is also problematic. Bergner began the book with full access to the prison and an admiring view of Cain as a benevolent figure intent on uplifting the fallen at Angola. That view changed entirely when Cain tried to hit him up for editorial control and a portion of the book's proceeds in return for continued access to the prisoners. Bergner turned him down and then successfully sued to continue his interviews. It was a gutsy move and a worthy one. But it makes you wonder how much of his subsequent reporting is colored by personal animus and why he was so taken with Cain's unctuous posturing in the first place.

Similarly, the book overreaches a bit in its search for transcendent meaning. Near the end of the book, Terry Hawkins, who is serving a life sentence for hacking his boss to death with a meat ax, wins another of the horrors of the rodeo, a contest called ''guts and glory,'' in which some 30 inmates attempt to pluck a red chip worth $100 strung between a bull's horns without getting gored or kicked in the process. ''For one thing was clear,'' Bergner writes of Hawkins, ''that in these desires he wanted what anyone, anywhere did: money, a better life, a clear conscience, and oblivion.'' Really? Oblivion? Bergner's story is so powerful in the telling, it really didn't need to grasp so hard for profundity.

Still, this is an eloquent and valuable book. Bergner deserves credit for bringing such passion and intelligence to this story, and for fighting a legal battle to tell it at a time when 1.7 million people are behind bars in the United States and prisons exercise almost total control over what outsiders get to see of their lives. There's not much cachet to prison reporting these days. Bergner's rich, probing and compassionate book is a rare look at both the physical and spiritual world on the other side of the bars.

