Fat City Goes Fascist : KISSES OF THE ENEMY <i> by Rodney Hall (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 622 pp.)</i>

“Kisses of the Enemy” is a swirling parable about the rise and fall of a 600-pound Australian dictator. A cabal of U.S. financial and strategic interests puts him in office. Once he begins to confuse his usefulness with power, they remove him.

Rodney Hall, a novelist and poet of strong and unmistakable voice, is not simply doing a variation on the cautionary tale of power corrupting and then corroding itself.

In a way, “Kisses” is in the long line of an “Emperor Jones,” an “Arturo Ui,” a “Citizen Kane”; but it is more than that. It is in the line of the it-can-happen-here stories--a kind of Australian “1984”--but it is something else as well.

Essentially, Hall is painting upon a large canvas, in a style blending the surreal and the post-Expressionist, his vision of the Australian horror. It is the Antipodean horror; that of a vast country of weird land formations and barren moonscapes, and, isolated inside it, a people unable to deal with its own history.

Lacking the sense of history, in Hall’s view, it is a people immediately vulnerable to anyone of history’s latest and most noxious by-products. He presents his countrymen as short-sighted, self-satisfied, feckless and helpless. If you don’t know who you are, anyone can take you over; even an easy-going, faintly clownish man of the people, bloated up to a third of a ton by surreptitious nourishments from abroad.

Australians, Hall writes, “can be swindled without suspecting anyone less duplicitous than God.”

The plot, deliberately simplistic and, if such a thing can be, strident, tells of the shadowy IFID--Interim Freeholdings Inc. of Delaware--operating at a time in the near future. It already controls seven or eight unspecified countries; now it will take over Australia.

Its two principal agents are a 90-year-old newspaper magnate, Sir William Penhallurick, and a debonair and sinuous operative--the one careful man in a land of careless people--named Luigi Squarcia.

Their first step is to maneuver public opinion into voting a referendum to establish Australia as a republic, with a president replacing the symbolic authority of the queen. The second is to elect Bernard Buchanan, an unremarkable real estate speculator, as that president. He then signs a contract to respect IFID’s interests.

These interests include, on the one hand, the use of a part of Australia’s emptiness as testing sites for an array of surreptitious weapons. Among them are illegal space devices and a tidal-wave machine. (In the course of testing it, one coastal town is drowned and a large metropolitan cultural complex collapses.)

The other interest is the control of the Australian economy. By the time the book ends, bankers have established a 70% interest rate, the middle and working classes have been reduced to a state of Orwellian misery, and IFID owns half the country.

In the course of helping all this to happen, Buchanan has created an all-pervasive watchdog police, reduced Parliament to a figment, set up a universal system of internal surveillance, sent thousands to jail and rounded up immigrants into vast forced-labor camps.

Swelling in all senses, he becomes unable to walk and needs eight bearers to carry him. He puts up with a nest of mice in one of his belly folds and with their continual chewing at his vitals; he is too fat to reach them, and too suspicious of his entourage to ask for help. Power swelled into impotence.

Buchanan’s downfall is hastened by a network of adventurous underground saboteurs--workers, mostly--led by a flamboyant former prostitute named Mama. It is brought about, though, by IFID itself, irritated by Buchanan’s resistance over various minor matters and embarrassed by his flamboyant engrossment.

There are realistic passages here and there in Hall’s large-scale and complex narrative, and they are handled brilliantly.

There is, for example, a brawl between Peter Taverner, a tuna fisherman, and a group of policemen who arrest him and try to shake him down for drunk driving. The melee is comic, violent and vividly detailed. Later, there is a hair-raising account of Taverner--now in the resistance under the name of Wild Dog--ambushing a shipment of missile parts.

Hall can do anything he wants with language; but for the most part, he eschews realism and writes of his characters as larger-than-life figures moving in the drugged rhythms of nightmare.

They are grotesque and emblematic, for the most part. The aged Penhallurick, bloodless and evil, has murdered half a dozen wives in his progress from Hungarian immigrant to billionaire. He is scrofulous and deposits tiny flakes of skin upon whatever he touches. His final wife--who will eventually poison him--is signaled by her habit of continually blowing her nose.

Squarcia, the archetype of the finagling international operative, is as immaculate as Mephistopheles and leaves a faint perfumed imprint. Wild Dog is a young Siegfried, a flash of yellow hair.

Dorina, Buchanan’s angelic wife, who loves him and hates what he does, is an angel in chains. She plays the piano all day--art as evasion--and everything around her turns into music. “Her kettle sang Amen and the toaster clashed its tiny discordant cymbals.”

The dreamlike movement can be ravishing. There is, for example, a magical and sharply touching scene towards the end. Dorina, breaking out to liberation and death, walks by the seaside. A herd of whales is trying to beach itself. All of nature is out of order in this diseased land. Dorina runs among them, pushing them back. “Please, Buchanan,” she calls out to them.

“Kisses of the Enemy” is closer to a processional masque than an allegorical novel. It calls to mind, in fact, the Fallas, that extraordinary political carnival held each year in Valencia. Twenty-foot Giants and Big-heads are built to represent various topics of civil vice or satire.

They bob along, nodding and bending; and as long as the procession moves, the effect is stunning. But a city and a parade being what they are, they come to frequent halts.

If you are there, alongside, suddenly this gay and terrifying representation of an abstract idea becomes an inert construction, yards of cloth and papier-mache, motionless and expressionless. At most, out of an eyehole, you may catch an intelligent individual gleam.

Becalming is the problem in this talented book. Hall’s grotesques are more than human, or not quite human. In their moves, they are unforgettable. But over 600 pages, with repetitions, slowdowns and a lot of turning in place until the procession resumes, they spend a lot of time as immobile artifacts.

Sometimes, brilliantly, we see Buchanan’s stubborn and wistful eyes peering out of his own effigy. But it is the effigies that count; and Hall’s book comes to a halt, its spectacular colors drooping, when they do.