FELIX MALDONADO woke up one morning to find he lost his face and name. Or rather, Felix Maldonado woke up one morning and discovered he had undergone plastic surgery and been given an alias. All because he had failed in an assassination plot on Mexico's president's life--an act he had performed against his will.

So begins a crucial section of leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' latest novel, The Hydra Head. Billed as the first Third World spy thriller," The Hydra Head is about the loss of identity of Felix Maldonado, a minor bureaucrat in the Mexican government. In a Kafka-esque world in which he has no autonomy, Maldonado becomes an unwilling assassin in an international spy network competing over Mexico's newly discovered oil supply.

The Hydra Head's plot, like that of most of Fuentes' novels, is practically non-existent. It concerns Felix Maldonado's passive evolution from a petty civil servant in the ministry of Economics to a staked assassin. Events are connected enigmatically--Maldonado returns from his operation to his Jewish wife who is rocking mutely in a nun's habit; a man killed in a meat freezer scrawls the word "nun" in blood on the glass door. The reader, along with Maldonado, wonders whether and why things occur. All the disjointed events arrive at a climactic suspension--Maldonado's second attempt on the President's life. The reader never discovers whether Maldonado is successful the second time.

Fuentes, as in his others works, does not develop his characters any better than he explains why they exist or what exactly they are doing. Maldonado is the only three-dimensional protagonist--a confused middle-aged stud who resembles a Velasco painting. Maldonado's triad of women--the seductive Mary, loyal Rebecca and unattainable Sarah--fill the traditional female novelistic roles of whore, mother and virgin. Maldonado's purposeless orders come from two spies, the nationless Timon and the clove-smelling Lebanese Ayub, and a Mexican economics professor Bernstein and the bullying Director General. The only thing which binds all characters is their obsession with Mexican oil. Oil permeates the entire novel, motivating violence and friendship. It is everywhere--smeared between a woman's breasts and spilled in the streets.

In Fuentes' past works, characters serve as allegories for social classes and periods in Mexican history. The same holds true in The Hydra Head. Timon and Ayub represent Arab competition with Mexico in the oil market. Their opposition to the president stems from Mexico's refusal to join OPEC. The director and Bernstein stand for Mexico's business sector's desire to gain control of government policy-making concerning oil. In the middle, the confused Maldonado, with his changing faces and indecisiveness, symbolizes Mexico. Fuentes makes him a converted Jew both to emphasize his transformations and his antipathy towards the Arab world. His impotency over his own life is analogous to Mexico's lack of independence in the international scene. Just as Mexico is "in the grips of the beak of the U.S. and Russia", Maldonado is manipulated by absent foreign officials. Oil, the "hydra head of our passions," forces Mexico, the U.S. and the Arab world to assume different alliances in the same manner that Maldonado constantly readjusts his relations with other characters.

In The Hydra Head, Fuentes departs from his customary focus. He formerly wrote historical novels, such as Terra Nostra and Change of Skin, about the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution's ideals by its bourgeois leadership. He blended Aztec and Roman Catholic mythology, Marxism and experimental literary techniques in his criticism of Mexican society. In The Hydra Head, however, Fuentes concerns himself with Mexico's role in the international economic and political realm, rather than with its internal problems.

Fuentes is better suited to writing international thrillers than to his previous domestic historical novels. The Hydra Head is his tightest piece of writing--perhaps because he is writing about something he knows more about. His past raptures on Indians and condemnations of fellow members of the powerful cosmopolitan bourgeoisie seemed insincere. Writing about a highly-sexed group of jet-setters rather than peasants seems to come more naturally to Fuentes.

Fuentes has not changed, however, is in his use of surrealism to express confusion and to perplex the reader. Although this technique is annoying at times, it does not distract from The Hydra Head's quick pace. If the bizarre seems pointless, sometimes, it does not inhibit one's desire to know where it all leads. Ultimately, the novel is frustrating: more and more it tells the reader less and less. Unlike traditional thrillers, the final scene leaves one with new questions rather than resolved mysteries.

The Hydra Head's merit lies not in its style, but is its theme. Mexico's discovery of oil has raised many questions about its political and economic relations to other nations, its potential for development, and its ability to resolve domestic inequalities.

The first translated copies of The Hydra Head came to New York bookstores just three years before Carter's visit to Mexico to negotiate oil deals. Fuentes would have smiled at the results of the talks. If the author had written a sequel to The Hydra Head at that point, maybe he would have had Felix Maldonado wake up to find he had regained his original name, or perhaps an ear or a nostril.