An Unappeased Spirit:THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINT<i> By Gabriel Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 230 pp.) </i>

In 1830, Simon Bolivar, the brilliant and paradoxical figure who liberated much of South America from Spain but failed in his dream of keeping it together, resigned his office. With a few loyalists, he journeyed down the Magdalena River to the coast, where he would die a few months later.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who has written so much of the true history of the continent by imagining it, has taken this last, little-known venture by its supreme historical figure to write a meditation on power, old age and the destiny of his people.

“The General in His Labyrinth” takes a dying phrase of Bolivar’s--”How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?”--as the marvelously well-placed keystone for the book. We die when our life gets lost in the tangle of its own journey. A great life is a great journey and a great tangle. Garcia Marquez’s Bolivar fights to keep hold of the contradictory thread of an unappeased spirit facing eviction from a failed body.

Like the patriarch who daily makes a will and tears it up, Bolivar--old, shrunken and ill after 47 years of prodigious life--is avid to relinquish his power and to retain it. He resolves to abandon the effort to make a mighty state out of Latin America--”I have plowed the sea,” he wrote--while he plots and struggles to go on with it. He exercises a spacious wit and generosity while carrying out crabbed maneuvers of calculation and distrust. One boot on Charon’s barge and one hooked firmly to the river bank, he departs and remains at the same time.

It is a barge, in fact, that he will board--one of seven--after an arduous mule-back trek from the highlands down to the upriver port of Honda. A river is one of the great classical images of life, and Garcia Marquez intends the Magdalena--which he used so powerfully in “Love in the Time of Cholera”--to mark a life’s illusions and regrets, and the drift into its end.

First, though, comes the introductory scene, the best in the book: the lion cornered by his enemies and by his own confused passions. Having resigned the presidency and waiting in vain for the congress to call him back, Bolivar proclaims his instant departure for Europe. Yet nobody--not his enemies, his friends, nor perhaps himself--has any certainty as to whether he will actually go.

We meet him, tiny and feverish, floating in the bath in his customary deathlike trance. Jose, his loyal servant, comes before dawn to prepare him for the journey. “Let’s go as fast as we can. No one wants us here,” Bolivar had commanded. But he has announced his departure too often. “He won’t leave and he won’t die,” is the slogan scratched upon the walls of Bogota, his capital.

The opposition suspects him of wanting to perpetuate his rule, and name his successor. Furthermore, much of the local Colombian establishment, led by Gen. Santander--it evolved into the Liberal Party that would battle in successive civil wars with the Conservatives, who trace their lineage to Bolivar--wants an independent country it can control, and not an unwieldy federation that could threaten it. In each of the states, in fact, a separatist faction opposes, and eventually will prevail over, the Bolivarians.

The days of hesitations, of visits, of delegations bidding him farewell--some hoping to persuade him to remain, others fearful that they will succeed--are a poignant and ironic dance of veiled signals. Bolivar assembles a few personal items in a knapsack--”We never would have believed that so much glory would fit into a shoe,” he says grandiloquently, while arranging for seven pack mules to carry the rest. It is both fraudulent and authentic, and so are the lines that put an end to this introductory section:

“It was the end. Gen. Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was leaving forever. He had wrested from Spanish domination an empire five times more vast than all of Europe, he had led 20 years of wars to keep it free and united, and he had governed it with a firm hand until the week before, but when it was time to leave he did not even take away with him the consolation that anyone believed in his departure.”

And indeed, throughout the slow, arduous trip downriver, struggling with sickness, greeted at each river port by killer banquets and deadly ceremonials, we follow Bolivar fluctuating in his labyrinth, recalling the past, dissembling before the present and the future.

In fact, he never does board the ships that his staff successively books and cancels. He will die in Santa Marta, still planning military actions against separatists in Colombia and Venezuela, and sending ambiguous answers to a new government in Bogota that begs him to come back.

Garcia Marquez, as always, is doing several things at once. There is the portrait of the caudillo fighting his last battle: a dying that shatters his visionary solipsism by forcibly introducing him to the society of worms. There is the hot fecundity of the continent’s lowlands, so fecund that, as we have seen in the author’s previous books, life is hospitable both to a thing and its opposite. Magic realism, we call it; stress the realism.

There is, now that the author is embroidering upon a real figure, a more explicit political message. His Bolivar, for all his vices and self-will, represents a grand destiny that Latin America has lost to a small-minded bourgeoisie that masks its greed with constitutional pieties. In the author’s general, we glimpse his own affinity to Fidel Castro; not as a political saint, but as the mythic monster that fits his vision of his world.

All these things make “The General” a distinguished book. It is not, however, anywhere up to the masterpieces: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.” The incidents of the journey, the appearance of ghosts, memories and sweating mayors are quirky and alluring. But they seem choppy and repetitive or even forced. The Magdalena provides a sluggish binding current; it is a river of mud that only intermittently becomes a river of legend.

Garcia Marquez’s power seems curiously hobbled in dealing with a historical figure on the scale of Bolivar. He splendidly presents his image of Latin America and of a great man redux. Redux apart, his protagonist lacks the teeming variety, the strength, the mysterious and comic vitality; in short, the magical reality--and thus, the reality--of Col. Buendia in “One Hundred Years,” or of the trio of geriatric demigods in “Love.”