LIFE IN THE PAST LANE

Since its original publication 25 years ago, Jack Finney's time-travel novel Time and Again has been charming readers (and repeat readers) with its story of an ad-agency illustrator, Si Morley, who wills himself, via self-hypnosis, back to the New York City of 1882. A movie based on the book, with Robert Redford involved, is in the works; there's a musical being adapted from it; and now Finney (also the author of the three-times-filmed Invasion of the Body Snatchers) has written a sequel to his cult classic. Dangerous things, sequels. They most often disappoint, and sometimes even end up diminishing the appeal of the original. From Time to Time (Simon & Schuster, $23) does a little of both. Hero Morley, jumping from the Gilded Age of the 1880s to the ragtime era of 1912, is on a monumental mission: to prevent World War I from ever happening. But he seems far more excited about going to a Broadway melodrama, gaping at Fifth Avenue mansions, and drinking beer with vaudeville players than he is in improving the fate of all mankind. Finney lets his penchant for travelogue get the best of him. Nor does Finney play any of the brainteaser games that make time-travel fiction so much fun to read. In the original, Morley falls in love with a 19th-century woman, and decides to marry her and remain in the past. Here, it apparently never occurs to Finney to have Morley encounter his now middle-aged wife or even himself as an older man-because this is more a theme park than a fantasy novel, an environmental re-creation of a presumably happier, more harmonious time in America. Almost everyone Morley meets looks ''secure and confident.'' There are no drive-by shootings, and the luxury liner Mauretania sails at midnight. Who wouldn't want to visit 1912, at least for a little while? That's what Finney is counting on, of course. And he's a very amiable tour guide, cataloging social fads and fashions with passionate affection. He shows us society types dancing the turkey trot at the Plaza, then takes us for a barnstorming flight over Manhattan in Frank Coffyn's ''hydro-aeroplane.'' He introduces us to Teddy Roosevelt and Al Jolson, and books us a stateroom aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage. Yet even when we're out in the North Atlantic with Si, heading toward that inevitable (or perhaps not) iceberg, Finney never accelerates his pacing or tries to make the narrative gripping. He just keeps pointing out the plush furnishings and listing what's on the menu in the dining room. Nothing substitutes for the old-fashioned love story that was so pivotal to Time and Again, and Morley comes off as capable and curious but ultimately a cardboard hero. Not for a second is he in any real jeopardy, nor does he ever worry that he might not make it back home to his wife, his child, and his dog in gas-lit Old New York. Which is not to say Finney's sequel doesn't provide several hours of pleasant diversion. It does. You just wish the novelist in him had occasionally throttled the popular historian. C

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