"IN the genesis of all my movels," Marquez has said in an interview, "there's always an image. The first image I had of The Autumn of the Patriarch was a very old man in a very luxurious palace into which cows come and eat up the curtains." But the image is a metaphor for the two parallel tracks on which The Autumn runs. First, the omnipotent Dictator which provides the opportunity to reflect on the nature of absolute power, the underlying theme of all Marquez's novels. The second is a meditation on the cyclic nature of time where the past was not what was but what is and will be. The solitude of power, especially absolute power, and its degeneration suffuse the novel from its opening pages. The more things change, the more they remain the same; everything stinks and crumbles but nothing changes.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is not a novel in the conventional sense. Plot, character, setting, recurring image and recurring action that constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of the novel are subsidiary to the basic themes: the character and ridiculousness of absolute power and the nature of stagnated time. There are separate sections and chapters - around ten pages each - but there are no paragraphs. So it reads like a long, uninterrupted sentence, as if it is a story told in one breath. Nor is there a story line; what we have rather is a description of the Patriarch's reign and the "death" of the tyrant who had made time stand still.

At the beginning of the novel, a mob invades the presidential palace. The narrator, who is one of the mob, describes how they found the body of the Patriarch who had ruled the country for hundreds of years, if not from time immemorial. Right from the start we are told to be prepared to take a journey into a lost time, "to enter the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power and the silence more ancient and things hard to see in the decrepit light." But though the novel is about a distant past in an unspecified Carribbean country, and it is written in the past tense, we soon realise that the past is not yet past. In fact, the past which the narrator can see because it has already happened, lies before him. He backs into the future unknown, memory moves forward, hope backwards. (This is the exact reversal of the primary coordinates by which we organise our reading of Anglo-American novels.)

The movement of the novel and the stories within stories is rather like a Pandora's box - boxes within boxes that cut through various layers of time. The introduction in the second section makes it clear that the death of the tyrant and the discovery of his body are not just one event marking the end of an era but a cyclical recurrence.

The second time he was found, chewed away by vultures in the same office, wearing the same clothes and in the same position, none of us was old enough to remember what had happened the first time, but we knew that no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth.

The dead tyrant is not the heir of the dead tyrant at the beginning of the novel. He is the very same one - and if he was his double it would be difficult to distinguish him from his forebears. And in the beginning of the third section:

That was how they found him on the even of his autumn, when the corpse was really that of Patrico Aragones, and that was how we found him again many years later during a moment of such uncertainty that no one could give in to the evidence that the senile body there gouged by vultures and infected with parasites from the depths of the sea was his.

And so on to the sixth section:

There he was then as if it had been he even though it might not be, lying on the banquet table in the ballroom with the feminine splendour of a dead pope amidst the flowers in which he would not have recognised himself in the display ceremony of his first death, more fearsome dead than alive.

The metaphor is clear: the beginning is the end. Past, present and future are one - a long continuum with no beginning, no middle, no end. The Patriarch never dies; he is alive and dead at the same time, he is both himself and not himself, evil lives on from one generation to the next. Nothing is certain except a continuous process of decay and degeneration. Such is the nature of absolute power. It will never give up, even through rack and ruin all around and the cycle of everlasting decomposition.

In the Catholic, Latin American world, The Autumn of the Patriarch has often been taken as Nietzsche's "death of God," where the evil hour lives on for ever. But the subtext asks us to look at it another way: to give up the linear concept of time, that decay and decomposition were inevitable and that perhaps the curve of tragedy will always be unbroken.

But do not take this as an apocalyptic view of the world. The novel is playfully joyous, it pokes fun at the big and powerful in an orgy of blasphemy and iconoclastic carnival that shows them up to be less than ordinary mortals. Marquez was asked in an interview that if he had to define the book in one single sentence how would he do so? "As a poem on the solitude of power," he said. That is what it really is.

RAVI VYAS