BOOK REVIEW : A Dark Parable of South Africa Politics : THIS DAY AND AGE, <i> By Mike Nicol</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $22; 276 pages

Amid the swirl of real and unreal in Mike Nicol’s raging South African parable there is a violent back-land visionary who leads a band of the disenfranchised and bears a Bible chained to his wrist. There is a baffled president swollen with fury and boils, an army division that vanishes in the desert, and a top-hatted shaman riding an ostrich.

“This Day and Age” is a pandemonium of styles. Its voice ranges from a terse Kafkaesque off-kilter to the savagery of a George Grosz cartoon. At other points, it moves through the blithe displacements of tropical magical realism, the dry buffoonery of a military dispatch and the supernatural malice of a folk tale. Much of its story is told once as a soothsayer’s prophecy, and a sometimes awkward second time when events catch up.

It is overwrought and often overworked. But Nicol is not parading his warring styles; he is making war with them. “Age” is deadly serious, and there is enough purposeful magic among the magic disorders to make the darkness of his South Africa glitter.

His vision seemingly has two poles; seemingly, because Nicol’s message is complex. One pole is the Boer ascendancy in the person of the president. He is seen at various points between the beginning of his reign (when he consults the soothsayer) and the end, when he dies of a heart attack but goes on raging in his coffin.

The other pole represents the explosive universe of the oppressed. It is personified by Enoch Mistas, born in a remote settlement in the arid northwest and endowed with strange powers. A plague and famine temporarily let up at his birth, and a mysterious blue light shines over him.

Mistas grows in wrath and purpose, gathers a band of felons and the impoverished with a call for land and justice, and repels and humiliates two military expeditions by both armed and spiritual means. In a final confrontation, his followers are butchered and the division sent against them perishes afterward in the desert. Mistas, repeatedly shot dead, ascends magically through a church roof and disappears.

The president--he is given no name but it seems reasonable to associate him with the late President Botha, at least politically--is drawn in savage caricature. He considers himself a builder and something of a reformer; he has eased the theocratic rigor of his predecessors. Even though the “natives” are impoverished and have few rights, they can now, for example, patronize any hotel they choose. If they have the money, that is.

Yet the horror is unabated. The president and the class he represents have no confidence in their sway over their vast country and its invisible population. The seat of power is not secure. The president can’t even sit on it, in fact, because his boils--an erupting landscape worthy of Hieronymus Bosch--prevent it. And his military commander, who sends futile expeditions against Mistas and leads the last one himself, has piles.

If the governors are a fetid cartoon, done in heavy black strokes, the world of Mistas is a misty cosmos, described in shifts of language and imagery. The remote village where he grows up--a community of bootmakers governed by a church--could be Garcia Marquez territory. His mother is a raving beauty who demands prodigious sex once a year and wears out her husband, an insatiable gourmand and storyteller. Mistas’s own father is an itinerant stranger.

As a leader and prophet, he is set out in prose that is variously biblical, mystical and folkloric. There is the harsh, brutal tale of Dead Das, his murderous lieutenant. There is the strange, ostrich-riding Mxtimi, who writes crude love poetry and has sex only with boys. There is a lovely pastoral interlude when Mistas falls in love with Tasmaine, a waif, and then brutally mistreats her when it turns out she lacks sex organs. Hopelessness unsexes, and Tasmaine’s deformity, of course, is part of Nicol’s parable.

It is a many-layered parable. The author is getting at something more far-reaching than apartheid, for instance. We understand the dispossessed underclass to be black, yet this is never specifically mentioned.

Mistas’s native village and his family have Boer names; their wanderings several generations earlier have a decided suggestion of the Boers’ own wanderings. As for Mistas’s followers, these include Greeks and Portuguese, perhaps of mixed blood.

But the author leaves the racial lines in some indistinctness. The evils of oppression go beyond race, he suggests. He blurs other lines, as well. Mistas is the permanent voice of revolution but he is more than that; he is a tyrant, a megalomaniac and a fanatic. At one point, the president dreams that he and Mistas are, in fact, standing hand-in-hand among ruins. It is Nicol’s broader reminder that the Boers, like Mistas and his people, were once oppressed, revolutionary and prophetic.