BOOK REVIEW : Sermonizing Snuffs the Spark of Magic : CYRUS CYRUS <i> by Adam Zameenzad</i> ; Viking $21.95, 578 pages

Magic is a rarity, almost by definition. That is why magical realism can never be a writing school, and if it does become one, most of the enrolled are likely to flunk out.

In “Cyrus Cyrus,” Pakistan-born writer Adam Zameenzad attempts something of what Salman Rushdie accomplished in “The Satanic Verses.” The world of tradition, deprivation, catastrophe, myth, communal inflammation and communal nourishment in South Asia is infinitely distant from the world of the West.

Yet it is no time at all by television satellite, and only a few hours by plane; hundreds of thousands have taken a plane, mostly flying West. One of the great cultural and social shifts of our time, not fully understood, is the juxtaposition of two contradictory worlds, like a blob of matter and a blob of anti-matter jostling for the same seat on the bus.

Rushdie made a tremendous explosion out of this; his realism and his magic weave in and out of each other. But it was because he has the fevered yet disciplined imagination to let the realism make the magic concrete, and the magic elevate the realism.

Zameenzad, producing a book almost as long and quite as feverish, has turned out what is, for the most part, a blur--all abracadabra, little hat and almost no rabbit at all.

The story of Cyrus, preceded by a chain of gravely facetious forewords and explanations, begins in an English jail where the narrator and protagonist has been condemned for poisoning three children. He is innocent, but the grisliness and injustice are of a piece with everything else that has happened to him in his packed and picaresque life.

Born in India to a caste of Untouchables whose traditional job is to empty night soil jars, Cyrus and his relatives flee to East Pakistan in the wake of communal riots.

East Pakistan is shortly to become Bangladesh, and during the civil war that brings this about, Cyrus’ family is butchered. Befriended by two American swamis, he is taken to an ashram in the American Southwest, escapes, lives with a woman pickpocket in New York and, after one rich haul, flies to London.

There he lives successively with Belinda, a black activist, and Jennifer, a white woman. Each bears him a child.

Belinda perishes in a fire. Cyrus becomes a street person and eventually winds up in an abandoned house with Jennifer’s son from a previous union, Jason, and his own two children. Jason, a mystical blond creature who kept appearing to Cyrus ever since he--Cyrus--was a child, feeds them all poisoned chocolate pudding. It is a loving gesture that declares the world no fit place to live. Cyrus survives, is tried and jailed, escapes and dies.

“Cyrus Cyrus” is vast and sprawling, larger than life and rarely alive. It is not so much Gargantuan as Brobdingnagian--an ordinary being so inflated that it is 10 minutes’ hike from one toe to the next. Ordinary toes.

The best parts of the book are those that are most savagely real: the description of floods and killings in Bangladesh, the life of down-and-outers in London. These produce stirring and bitterly parodic moments.

One of Cyrus’ starving street cronies comes back radiant with good news. He has AIDS. It means he will be sheltered and fed and can die in a warm bed. His fellow vagrants rush to assault him sexually; perhaps they can contract the same good fortune.

There are some sardonic conversations with God, whom Cyrus regards as a smug Western oppressor. When Cyrus complains of seeing diners at an expensive London restaurant glancing at a television screen that shows scenes of Ethiopian starvation, God offers to put matters right. Suddenly, hordes of dying Ethiopians are watching television sets that show rich Londoners at dinner.

But such gritty moments are few and far between. The reader--like one of Orwell’s derelicts taken into a street mission--must put up with great clouds of mystical talk to get a little soup.

Cyrus has periodic encounters with a magical tiger and a magical cobra; they’re ravening and poison, respectively, and seem to stand for the authentic spirituality he has lost in the West. Camping at Stonehenge with Belinda, he goes through 40 pages of out-of-body experiences. At the end, there is an interminable trip down to Hades, across various underworld rivers, and through various magical ordeals.

Perhaps if Cyrus’ voice were keener, better tuned or more intelligent, these lengthy interludes would convey a spark of magic. As it is, they are tedious sermonizing. And even when he is talking about material things, Cyrus is hopelessly vague and self-absorbed.

None of the other characters--not even his beloved Belinda and Jennifer--seem to exist except as an occasion for him to announce his feelings about them. Even these are sprawling and vague and end up being about himself.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Buffalo” by Sidney Blair (Viking).