One......

Readers will need a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy this earnest pastiche of inspirational memoir/romantic adventure/science fiction, but then Bach's fans have swallowed everything from Jonathan Livingston Seagull to The Bridge Across Forever . Under the spell of quantum physics, Bach and his wife Leslie are catapulted into an alternate world, in which they exist simultaneously in many different incarnations. First they encounter themselves as they were 16 years ago on the day they first met; in this version of their lives, they do not marry, and never achieve the happiness Bach assures us that their real union has produced. Then we see Leslie as a poverty-stricken teenager who gives up her ambition to be a concert pianist, and Richard as an Air Force fighter pilot who will be responsible for the deaths of people in wartime. The adventures go farther afield to include encounters with Attila the Hun, with the ``idea fairy,'' Tink, who wears a hard hat and works in a foundry, with a 12th century hermit who teaches Richard and Leslie that ``whoever wants truth and light'' should eschew organized religion, and many others. Each of the inspirational set pieces preaches the same message: of the power of each individual to choose the ways of peace, brotherhood and love, to live with a reverence for nature and at harmony with the universe. Bach again displays an inventive imagination and inspirational zeal, and these little homilies can either be uplifting or mightily boring, depending on the reader's point of view. Literary Guild alternate. (October)