BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Kind of ‘Animal Farm’ Without a Moral to the Story : ANIMAL PLANET <i> by Scott Bradfield</i> ; Picador USA $22, 231 pages

“Animal Planet,” Scott Bradfield’s new novel, is shot through with numerous undeveloped themes, but one stands out as particularly undernourished. In a chapter entitled “Pop Star,” in which long-boiling dissatisfaction among the Earth’s animals erupts into full-scale revolution, Bradfield writes that “It wasn’t even a political crisis anymore. It was a crisis of representation. . . . Words no longer represented things, governments no longer represented people, and images no longer represented stuff.”

“Animal Planet” shows hints, at this point, of turning into an effective satire of Westernized culture, a satire in which the grunts and snuffles, sticks and stones of the mutinous animals carry more meaning than the human words they replace.

The moment, alas, is fleeting. A modern version of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”--broadened, deepened, updated--sounds promising in the abstract, but the target and intent of this rendition is never certain. Bradfield, author of the well-received novel “The History of Luminous Motion,” here seems to suffer from the same problem his character Charlie the Crow encounters upon arriving at the mountaintop, literally, and looking over an apparently placid landscape he knows to be ravaged: a sense that “perspective” on life is illusory, that perspective is really “getting so far away from things you can’t see them clearly anymore.”

Charlie the Crow is the Thersites of “Animal Planet,” a talkative rabble-rouser who sets the animal revolt in motion by lecturing the inhabitants of the London Zoo about their oppression. Charlie isn’t particularly ambitious, doesn’t have a hidden agenda; he has simply seen a lot during his world travels and likes to hear himself speak. The crow isn’t exactly surprised when his words result in the animals’ decision to break out of their cages, but isn’t prepared to lead the revolution he’s fomented, either. He’d rather hit the road as a wandering agitator and soon teams up with Buster the Penguin in Antarctica to continue spreading words of animal liberation, letting the rebellion take whatever course it will.

To this point “Animal Planet” isn’t so different from “Animal Farm.” But in Bradfield’s novel the revolution doesn’t result in a new kind of tyranny, some supposedly socialist animals becoming “more equal” than others; instead, Charlie the Crow is subsumed, body and soul, by the capitalist system.

On the run from the U.S. government, which considers Charlie “dangerous and highly armed with every known variety of subversive rhetoric,” Charlie finds accidental, self-defeating salvation in the arms of the entertainment industry, which turns him into a hot commercial property. He becomes a latter-day Bill the Cat (of Berke Breathed’s late, lamented comic strip “Bloom County”); a multimedia celebrity--book writer, television star, spinoff king--as well as an inarticulate drunk. Soon everyone wants to meet Charlie because “the culture industry had gradually eroded Charlie’s image down to a level at which he didn’t represent anything anymore.”

It’s only a matter of time, of course, before Charlie loses his media-darling status, at which point he and Buster are captured--in a high-rated, media-circus television frenzy--and convicted of sedition. As for the revolution, it goes on without them, as much as it goes on at all.

Charlie’s heir apparent--the seemingly more dedicated revolutionary Scaramangous, a wildebeest who takes on the moniker Mr. Big--proves even more accommodating, settling for a few animally correct concessions from the U.S. President and a national late-night talk show for himself. The animal revolution can claim success but in fact has failed, ultimately feeding the system it hoped to overturn and producing only minor heartburn.

Bradfield attempts to make the novel slightly uplifting at the end by having Charlie take to the air once more in awkward, unaccustomed flight, and Buster return to his polar Penguin Island with a smile on his face. But these grace notes aren’t earned; Bradfield supplies no reason for hope in “Animal Planet,” and only late in the novel does he bother to explain why Charlie no longer flies (he’s too depressed, not gallantly providing his fellow flightless bird, Buster, with company).

There’s good literary and social sense to be found in this novel, but it’s been put together in a nonsensical way, as if Bradfield has really taken to heart the notion that words don’t matter, that free will is an illusion, that systems will always triumph over individuals. Orwell would not be pleased.